


I’ve Kissed You Before, but I Didn’t Do It Right (Can I Try Again)

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Anal Sex, Awkward First Times, Blow Jobs, Concealing Feelings Inside Complicated Metaphors, Drunk Sex, Explicit Language, Friend Interventions, Hand Jobs, M/M, Minor Injuries, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-13 04:30:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16010333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: Ryan grabs for Shane’s banana and takes a bite out of it. In his head it was supposed to be sexy, but he realizes as he’s chewing that it might hit a little close to home. Shane must be remembering the same thing, because he blanches and looks away.“Sorry, too soon?”“I’m having a Pavlovian response to the flash of your teeth around a phallic object,” Shane says, “and now my balls are trying to crawl back inside my body. Something tells me that’s not what you were going for.”“No,” Ryan agrees, still chewing.***After months of mooning around each other, forces (read: alcohol, nerves, gravity, tender feelings) conspire to ruin Ryan and Shane’s first night together. With a little help from their friends, dramatic training montages set to 80’s rock anthems, and the early filmography of Harrison Ford, can our heroes get things back on track?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This one’s for Libby, who requested feelings and bad sex leading to more feelings and good sex. 
> 
> Specific videos referenced in this fic are [“We Styled Ryan and Shane”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8o66BeE_pc&t=604s) and [“The Treacherous Treasure Hunt of Forest Fenn"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsuWS6yE478) I’ve screwed with the TC season 4 timeline a little, because I wanted to and we all understand that time is a flat circle anyway.
> 
> Title’s from “Pink in the Night” by Mitski.

Sometimes Shane thinks that Ryan _looks_ at him.

He can’t be sure, not 100%. It’s tough to tell, when you work in digital media, because everybody’s always looking at everybody. Always Reacting to Things, and Reacting to People Reacting to Things, and it’s just reactions all the way down. But sometimes he’ll turn his head in the middle of some dumb thought or joke and Ryan will be _looking_ , a wide grin on his face and something in his eyes that Shane can’t explain away.

At first he assumes Ryan craves the validation, because Ryan’s younger and moves more self-consciously through the world. Because every laugh from Shane, every compliment, makes Ryan sturdier on his feet—which is a feeling Shane remembers from his own uncertain twenties. Shane can’t blame Ryan for chasing that while he’s figuring out what his life’s going to be.

But the more Shane pays attention, the more he thinks it could be something else. Something like a crush, so subtle Ryan might not even realize he’s nursing it, so close to friendly admiration or respect that it could easily be mistaken for that.

That’s a feeling Shane knows, too.

Shane notices it again while poking around his Twitter mentions after Midsummer Scream. A fan’s uploaded a video of the two of them telling some long-winded anecdote together, weaving it seamlessly like they’ve told it side-by-side a hundred times. Ryan’s eyes are fixed on Shane the whole time, star-filled and glassy under the hot lights. His laugh, full-bodied and frequent, is aimed at Shane for three and a half minutes straight.

 _@ryansbergara u put those guns and weaponized heart-eyes away right now before you hurt somebody_ , _and by somebody i mean @shalexandej_ , the tweet admonishes.

At the end of the clip, Ryan licks his lips and then rubs the back of his hand against his mouth.

 _Maybe_ , Shane thinks, hitting play on the clip a second time. It won’t ever amount to anything, and it could absolutely be wishful thinking on his part, but: yeah, maybe.

He watches that clip about six times in total, and tells himself that’s a perfectly normal thing to do.

*

Sometimes, Shane allows himself to look back. He can look, he tells himself—there’s no harm in that, nothing incriminating or pushy—but he won’t touch, and everybody gets to keep their dignity and go home happy.

He’s not looking try to make something happen; not being attentive with purpose or ulterior motive. It just makes him feel warm, to laugh at Ryan’s stupid jokes until Ryan goes pink with pride, until he gets flustered and buoyant like Shane’s high opinion of him has made his day.

That’s just being a good friend.

Shane likes that Ryan feels everything so bare-facedly. There’s almost nothing as good as saying Ryan’s name, low and admonishing, _Ry-an_ , and watching Ryan’s face collapse into silent laughter because he knows perfectly well that whatever he said was the _stupidest thing_ on God’s green earth. Shane could watch that implosion into giggling self-deprecation all day long, forever.

Most of the time the looking is more than enough. Ryan’s sensitive to it, watching always for people who are watching him. He’ll catch Shane at it and offer a defensive tilt of the chin in response. Most of the time Shane will play it off: “I like that shirt,” or “You’ve got something in your teeth.” Occasionally he’ll jut his chin back and dare Ryan to be the one who says something about it first.

Ryan never says anything about it. He only goes twitchy and pleased if it’s a good day, or belligerent and aggressively _bro_ if it isn’t. Either’s a reaction, though, and equally satisfying to Shane in a “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” sort of way.

It’s exactly like winding Ryan up on location, until he’s so riled up that he jumps at the wind, at every little creak of a floorboard. Ryan responds to Shane’s attention the way he responds to other stimuli he senses but he can’t quite see head-on: with two-parts fear and one-part interest, and a little more boldly with every passing day.

If Shane’s glances get less stealthy, if his teasing gets more elaborate, if the Hot Daga’s morphing into some sort of torture-turned-love-letter, well—it’s not hurting anyone. 

*

Okay, so, every once in a great while, for special occasions, Shane lets himself touch. He’s not made of stone.

Not often, not so anyone would notice unless they were really looking for it, and rarely on camera (because the fans _are_ looking for it), but: an arm around a shoulder here. A graze of knees under a table in the canteen there. The ghost of a hand on a lower back, rounding a corner in some dark, dusty house.

On one such occasion Ryan’s shoving a burrito in his face at lunch, a hard copy of his script laid out and red-inked between them. He doesn’t seem to realize he’s left a little sour cream lingering on his face, a smudge of white Shane can’t stop staring at.

“Hey, man, you’ve got—” Shane motions to his own chin, catching Ryan’s eye.

“Oh, thanks,” Ryan says, distracted by the work in front of him, rubbing half-heartedly at the wrong side of his jaw.

“No, it’s to the left, it’s—okay, here, just stop moving, you animal. You’re ruining everybody’s appetites.” Shane reaches out with one hand to keep Ryan’s face still, and with the other he licks his thumb and reaches out with it to wipe the bit of sour cream away, surprising even himself with the casual intimacy of the touch. The muscles of Ryan’s jaw jump and clench under his fingers.

 _Come on, Ryan, react for me,_ he thinks, and then he enjoys the tingle that runs down his spine with Ryan’s frozen thousand-yard stare and surprised, nervous giggle. Ryan comes back to himself and redoubles his efforts, attending closely to the script in front of him. Shane can tell he’s only pretending to work because he doesn’t turn to a new page once in five minutes.

There’s chemistry there, in the push-pull of their play-fighting. Some degree of interest buried deep under Ryan’s bro hang-ups and Shane’s inherent cautiousness. _If we ever got the chance, we’d break the bed,_ Shane lets himself think, in his weaker, hornier moments, the rare occasions he lets himself consider such things. But he knows that chance won’t come. Ryan’s too eyes-on-the-prize for that, and so good at getting what he wants that Shane’s pretty sure he’d know by now if he was the prize.

That’s okay. What they have now is great, and Shane’s not unsatisfied. It’s actually kind of fun to flirt with no pressure, to wink as unabashedly as he wants, to reel in Ryan’s belly laughs like the catch of the day.

It’s enough for him.

*

They might have continued on like that forever, frozen in pleasurable yet agonizing stasis, if it wasn’t for nature’s greatest aphrodisiac, that great uninhibitor of men, demolisher of impulse control: alcohol.

They all go out for drinks one Friday night in the sticky heat of July to celebrate the new season of True Crime, the whole Unsolved crew and other coworkers tagging along because Buzzfeed’s footing the bill. Ryan’s there somewhere, but for a long time he’s only floating on the edges of Shane’s periphery. Shane gets too drunk too fast, because they’ve been working long hours and it’s been weeks since he’s had more than a couple of beers.

Shane’s evening is a blur of people in and out, shouting in his ear over unnecessarily-loud music, “buying” him drinks on the company’s dime. Then the slow trickle begins, folks heading home to partners or roommates or cats. It’s late when Ryan finds him, the bar more strangers than friends now.

“Shaaaane,” Ryan says loudly, plunking down next to Shane at the table where he’s been camped out for the last half an hour.

He looks _good_ , flushed and sweaty from the alcohol and the pleasure of being congratulated, over and over, on the new season. He tosses his arm around Shane’s shoulders, which is—that one’s new, Shane thinks, although everything’s a little blurry and uncertain. Ryan’s shirt’s working _so_ hard, pulled so tight at the biceps that it’s almost alarming, like the seams might rip at any moment.

“Hey man,” Shane says with a chuckle, not failing to notice how Ryan’s plastered himself against his side, how the heat of him is warming Shane’s whole body.

“Off to the races again. We make a good team, big guy.”

“So they keep telling me,” Shane agrees. Ryan runs his hand through his own hair, pushing it off his forehead, and Shane’s fingers twitch with the sympathetic impulse to reach out and pet it. Instead he wraps them around his drink, some pink fruity thing Kate or Kelsey or _other_ Kelsey—he doesn’t know, one of the Ks, he’s _so_ drunk—foisted on him before she bailed.

“I’m real drunk,” Ryan says, still a little too loud, right in Shane’s ear. He’s close, very close, and Shane can feel the breath on his neck.

“How drunk would you say you are, Ryan? Drunk as a lord? All mops and brooms?”

Ryan laughs, loose and easy. “I never know what you’re saying. Like, easily half the shit that comes out of your mouth, I don’t understand. Speak English, man.”

“Soused? In bed with your boots on? _Half-cocked_?”

“I’m only ever full-cocked,” Ryan says without thinking, “for the record.” Then his eyes widen in surprise. Shane watches Ryan think about back-pedaling, consider pulling away, and then sees the exact mind-blowing moment when something hardens behind his eyes and he decides not to.

Ryan reaches out to fish the cherry out of Shane’s glass, and his fingertips come away wet. He pops it in his mouth, licks the booze off his fingers, and aims a blinding grin in Shane’s direction.

“Noted,” Shane says, stunned, watching Ryan’s mouth close around his fingers. This is by far the boldest Ryan has been with him, and he’s too drunk to suss out the reasons why and _way_ too drunk to guard against it. This is unmistakable, mutual flirting, the kind he doesn’t have to second-guess, and his insides blaze with something at the brightly-lit intersection of joy and panic.

“I can’t figure out if I’m imagining—” Ryan starts, and then he shakes his head and cuts himself off. He reaches for Shane’s whole drink then, and takes a big gulp. “This thing with us, is it just in my head?”

“By all means, help yourself,” Shane says, and his voice sounds weak even to his own ears, small and an afterthought. The rest of the bar has faded out of focus; for Shane it’s only Ryan’s face and his arms and his fingers in his mouth and the unbelievable words he’s saying, _what the fuck_.

Because Shane’s drunk he offers up exactly what he’s thinking, which is, “You look like you’re about to bust out of that shirt. Like the Incredible Hulk. That’s what _I’m_ imagining.”

It’s an answer to Ryan’s question but also deliberately not, so that Ryan can point him the right way. Either back to the safe joking territory they know well, or right off the plank and into the unknown ocean.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Ryan counters, finishing off Shane’s drink with a toss and roll of his neck that’s too showy to be anything other than deliberate. Somewhere in the very back of Shane’s mind, almost too dim for him to make out through the alcohol and the churning excitement, there’s a five-alarm fire screaming _danger, danger_ , but he willfully ignores it.

“Yes,” Shane says, blunt and un-smiling, just to see what Ryan will do with it. Every part of him is buzzing, and his blood is hot and sluggish in his wrists where he can _feel_ it moving.

What Ryan does is reach out again, with a nervous, fidgety hand, to adjust the collar of Shane’s shirt where it’s gotten mussed up, to slide down to where Shane’s got a single button undone and undo a second one and then a third.

“I like when you wear them like this,” Ryan says, and his fingers splay on Shane’s collarbone for a second too long before pulling away. “You don’t always have to be so buttoned-up all the time. You can live a little, y’know?”

Shane nearly has a heart attack. Sober Shane, the angel on his right shoulder, reaches up from the depths of him to shake him very hard: _You are drunk. He is drunk. This is a bad call, my guy_. _You may only get one shot at this, so don’t fucking waste it._

But Drunk Shane’s here too, the devil on his left shoulder, whispering: _You’ll_ never _get another shot at this, buddy._ _Isn’t one night better than nothing?_

Shane’s a responsible guy, most of the time, but he’s only one three-sheets-to-the-wind human. Now that it’s in front of him on a platter, now that Ryan is openly looking and touching and telegraphing the strongest of DTF vibes, Shane can’t turn it down.

“I can live with the best of them,” he tells Ryan. “Wanna get out of here?”

Ryan’s eyebrows go up, way up. There’s no chance that he’s misinterpreting, but every chance that he thought this was harmless, directionless fun. Something to pretend to forget about in the morning. Maybe he was counting on Shane to be the adult here and steer them back to dry land.

“Yeah, okay,” he agrees. That’s the version of Ryan that six drinks gets you. He’s too sloshed to remember to be afraid, or to neurotically assess and re-assess. “But I’ve got the frat squad, so better be yours.”

 _The frat squad_ is Ryan’s roommates, and Shane thinks with a shudder how fast this evening would come screeching to a halt if Ryan tried to sneak him upstairs unnoticed in that bro den of iniquity. Shane doesn’t know what Ryan’s sex life is like usually, although he has guesses. He bets this would not go unremarked-upon.

“Mine is—mine is good,” Shane says, and he orders a Lyft. He tries to remember when he last changed his sheets.

They slip out from the table and make for the door. If this was a stranger Shane had just met, he’d be touching him—an arm around the waist, mouth on the back of his neck at the door—but Shane doesn’t know if their coworkers are still around. And part of him thinks Ryan will, if touched that way, startle and remember himself.

He settles for a light hand on Ryan’s lower back, a single fraught inch above where his t-shirt meets his pants, where a sliver of skin peeks out if Ryan raises his arms. Not so different from what Shane’s done a handful of times before on set, except he lets his fingertips spread out and dip under the waistband of Ryan’s pants.

Their Lyft pulls up to the curb and for a moment, just _one_ , Sober Shane seizes the reins.

“Ryan. Ryan. Look at me. You’re sure?”

Ryan looks up at him, eyes fuzzy but determined. “Duh. I’ve—we’ve—duh.”

That’s more than enough for the devil on Shane’s left shoulder, the one controlling his dick and his heart, even though the angel on his right is tugging at his collar and hissing _you’re a fucking idiot_ right in his ear.

*

The first clue Shane gets that this isn’t going to go how he hoped is the lack of _vision_. He’s worked in video production long enough by now to know that vision is key. Somebody’s got to have a clear picture of both the end goal and the getting there, or it’s all bound to fall apart.

It’s clear that neither he nor Ryan knows what they’re doing, or what they really want, or how to ask for it once they figure it out. They’re both tentative, for different reasons, hoping the other will take the lead.

In short, nobody’s executive producing, and isn’t that ironic.

It doesn’t start bad. Shane tips the Lyft driver twenty bucks like he’s some hotshot tech mogul, as an apology for their en-route pawing. He and Ryan spill into Shane’s apartment together, laughing wildly into each other’s’ shoulders, euphoric at their own nerve. For a while they make out on the couch, and that’s—shockingly wonderful, actually, Ryan a heavy, solid presence perched on Shane’s thighs, Ryan’s mouth hot on his, Ryan’s hands fisted in his hair. Ryan’s dick hard in Ryan’s pants where it’s pressed against Shane’s belly.

That’s an encouraging sign. Shane had been worried that Ryan was going along with this out of curiosity or out of boredom, that he’d get Ryan home and Ryan would discover he wasn’t into it. Ryan would be kind about it; he might even soldier through it to avoid letting Shane down or disappointing him, and _that_ would be the worst thing.

But neither of them knows what to do next, so they just…make out. For a really long time. Like, for half an hour, forty minutes maybe, although Shane’s not exactly checking his watch. Right when he thinks one of them is getting up the courage to move it along, somebody gets distracted and it sets them back a few steps.

Ryan’s making these unbelievable noises, frantic little rhythmic grunts that are making it difficult for Shane to focus on putting together a game plan. The sober bit of him, the part that still can’t believe this is happening, urges him not to push, even though the fact that Ryan’s still dressed is an affront to Shane’s entire person.

Finally, Ryan pulls back, breathing hard. “What do you—what do you want?”

_Everything. All of you. If you knew you’d run away so fast._

“I, I don’t—what do _you_ want?”

“I asked you first.”

“Well, I asked you…second,” Shane says lamely.

“I don’t know, I’ve never done this before. I assumed you—”

“Well,” Shane says, “I’ve barely done this before either, so—”

“Barely is more than never!”

Ryan makes a frustrated sound in his throat and rubs against Shane, and that’s the last straw. If somebody doesn’t touch somebody’s dick soon, Shane’s going to set his own apartment on fire and then salt the earth so no erections can grow there ever again.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, cupping Ryan’s hard-on through his jeans, rubbing very gently and watching as Ryan’s back snaps up ramrod straight. Shane divests Ryan of his jeans, tugs his boxer-briefs down around his thighs, and pulls his dick out.

One stroke, two, three—Ryan’s making those terrific noises again, his dick rock hard and hot and _real_ in Shane’s hand, it’s all considerably better than Shane could have imagined—and then suddenly Ryan is batting at Shane’s arm, frantic.

“Stop, you’ve, oh fuck, you’ve got to stop.”

“But you only just told me to start?” Shane asks. He stills his hand but doesn’t remove it, because his brain’s still trying to catch up with Ryan’s urgency.

“Yeah, but I’m close, so stop fucking touching me or I’m gonna—”

Shane goes to pull his hand away, but on the way his fingertips brush the head of Ryan’s cock, and then Ryan is ducking his head into Shane’s neck and _groaning_ and coming untouched with a shudder. Because his hand-eye coordination isn’t great it takes Shane a moment to realize that Ryan’s spurting all over his shirt. He reaches down to help Ryan through it, but he’s too late, and Ryan bucks out of his grip and winces at the oversensitivity.

That’s Shane’s second clue that maybe it isn’t in the cards for them tonight.

“Oh,” he says dumbly. Ryan’s still got his head tucked into the crook of Shane’s neck; Shane can feel his breath coming in uneven, ragged puffs.

“So much for whiskey dick,” Ryan says after a minute. He pulls back enough that Shane can finally get a good look at him, and his face and neck are all red. “I’m really sorry, that never—that doesn’t usually happen to me. I’m sure dudes always say that, but it’s true.”

“I don’t know what dudes say, but it’s, it’s fine, obviously. Don’t worry about it. _I’m_ sorry, that probably wasn’t very satisfying.”

“I can get it up again, if you give me a few minutes,” Ryan says, “And I could, _you_ , if you want.”

Shane’s not quite sure what Ryan’s offering, and he’s not sure if Ryan knows either, but he’s pretty sure the answer is _god yes_. What’s a little premature ejaculation between friends? It’s a compliment, really, knowing Ryan was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t help himself.

They can turn this around, easy.

*

Things don’t turn around. After their rocky start, things _escalate_ , like a tornado of unsexy badness that keeps picking up new debris and tossing it all over the place.

They move to the bedroom. Before Shane knows it, Ryan’s blowing him, or trying to. It’s clearly the first blowjob he’s ever attempted in his life and, in typical Ryan fashion, he’s biting off more than he can chew.

Sloppy is one thing, Shane can be down with sloppy, but this is playing with fire.

“Hey, you don’t have to go down so far,” Shane says as Ryan pulls off him for the fourth time, coughing and retching in a way that’s got Shane feeling more than a little nervous. It feels good, it does, but Shane’s alarm is making it hard to concentrate on the sensation.

“I hangh haaake ih,” Ryan says, muffled around Shane’s cock. It might be “I can take it,” but who can tell?

“You’re, you’re doin’ great, buddy!” Shane says a little wildly, trying to use his hands to pull Ryan’s head back, to make him stop trying to cram the whole thing down his throat in one go. He doesn’t want to be unsupportive, _but_.

Ryan pulls off and slaps Shane’s thigh, hard enough to hurt. Shane thinks maybe you should ask before you start slapping people around in bed, but it’s among the least of his concerns right now.

“Why are you being such a butthead about this?” Ryan asks. “Just let me figure out how to suck your dick without micromanaging!”

“I’m sorry,” Shane says, laughing helplessly, and then laughing more at the indignant expression on Ryan’s face. “It’s just, the gagging, it’s one of those things that’s porn-sexy but not always real-sexy. Like, I’m afraid you’re about to throw up on my dick right now. I can’t stress enough how much I would prefer you didn’t.”

Ryan’s already back at it, bobbing arrhythmically but with enthusiasm, and—oh, yeah, that’s better. Shane lets himself relax a little, enjoy the feeling of wet warmth around him, the filthy slurping sounds Ryan can’t help but make as he learns to control his saliva. He looks down and the sight of Ryan with a mouthful of his cock is enough to make it all worth it.

“Ah, fuck, that’s—yeah, Ry,” he mutters, and Ryan hums around him, pleased at the praise or the endearment or both. Shane feels the vibration in his toes. Shane’s dick twitches and swells with interest, and it must take Ryan by surprise because it throws him off his rhythm, shocks him into forgetting to keep his lips over his teeth.

The scrape of Ryan’s teeth on the sensitive underside of Shane’s dick, too un-gentle to be anything but an unpleasant accident, makes Shane recoil and instinctively kick out his leg in shock and a burst of sharp pain. But even that wouldn’t have been a dealbreaker, necessarily, if he didn’t accidentally clip Ryan on the side with his calf.

Ryan goes sprawling, too off-balance to catch himself, and tumbles off the side of the bed. Shane reaches out an ineffectual arm, but he can’t do much more than swipe at Ryan as he goes sailing past.

For a minute Shane lies there, frozen, like if he doesn’t move he can pretend this isn’t happening to them. Ryan makes a little groaning noise, pained rather than aroused this time, and Shane knows he should check in. He’s afraid of what he’ll see if he leans over to look on the floor.

“Jesus fuck, I’m so fucking sorry, you—teeth, and I,” he babbles finally, when he can speak.

“It’s okay, I’m okay, I…oh _no_.”

Ryan’s voice sounds strangely muffled.

“You okay down there?” Shane sits up and makes himself look. Ryan’s in a heap on the floor, where he must have landed face first, and he’s got his hand clapped over his mouth and nose. There’s…red, all over his face. “Fuck, are you bleeding?”

“’Tis but a scratch!” Ryan exclaims, blood pouring out from around his hand. “It’s just a flesh wound.”

“Oh my god,” Shane says, and he bolts down the hall to get a towel from the bathroom. As he goes he registers the absurdity of this whole thing, in the way that drunk people sometimes have moments of out-of-body clarity: of himself running, awkward and long-limbed like a naked Muppet while Ryan bleeds all over his bedroom floor from a horrible dick-sucking accident.

 _This is not how I wanted this to go_ , Shane thinks. _I told you so_ , _moron_ , his shoulder angel contributes unhelpfully. His demons are conspicuously silent, unless Shane counts the nagging worry and guilt that are already collecting in his gut.

He comes back and sits down on the floor next to Ryan, boner flagging at last, and mutely hands Ryan the towel. Ryan presses it over his nose and pulls himself up so he’s bent over, letting gravity do some of the work.

“Is it broken?” Shane asks. “Do you need the—” _oh god_ , “the emergency room?”

Ryan shakes his head. “Id’s jusd a dosebleed. Gibe be a sec,” he says through the towel.

Shane doesn’t know quite what to do, so he rests his hand palm-flat on Ryan’s back and rubs in a little circle, the way his mom used to when he was sick.

“I’m really sorry I kicked you,” he says again, but Ryan just shakes his head. “This isn’t going quite how I imagined.”

Ryan snorts. “No kidding.” That merits a follow-up— _did you imagine this?_ —but Shane can’t quite bring himself to ask, in case the answer is what he suspects and fears. Which is that Ryan jumped into this headfirst, drunk on whiskey shots and congratulatory cheer, and is already regretting it.

Shane gets him a wet washcloth, and some ice for his nose, and a beer because it can’t hurt. They sit on the floor watching an old episode of Futurama on Shane’s phone until the bleeding stops. The washcloth helps, but Ryan’s face is still pink-tinged from the nose down from the residue.

“You’re a mess, you need a shower,” Shane says, and then his heart swells a little when Ryan gives him a knowing look.

“A shower would be good. Care to join me? Maybe we can salvage this yet.”

Shane feels a twitch of interest. Dimly he realizes that he must be really gone on this dude, if all the flailing and screeching and bleeding hasn’t permanently killed his boner for the night. They can still save this.

“Yeah, that could be fun.”

*

And in another universe, one _other_ than this cursed hellscape where almost everything is exactly what Shane wants but warped at a fifteen-degree angle into wrongness, it could have been.

Shane is aware that shower sex with him is not entry-level sex. It is, at the very least, intermediate-level; he takes up _so_ much space, and the height difference is a thing that is harder to reckon with standing up, and everything is very slick.

They’ve had enough trouble tonight staying put on surfaces that haven’t been at _all_ slick, so that’s a thing Shane’s concerned about for sure.

But the water is hot and Ryan looks fucking great under it, hair slicked back from his forehead as he rinses the last traces of his bloody nose away, droplets clinging to his body in a way that makes Shane want to lean back and stare until the water runs cold.

Instead Ryan crowds him under the spray, comes up for a kiss that’s sweet and dirty at the same time, and Shane allows his reservations to slip away down the drain.

Ryan must be feeling the vibes again too, because it takes very little coaxing to get him hard a second time. Shane reaches for some shower gel and wraps a slippery hand around them both, stroking them together until Ryan’s panting is echoing off the tile and he’s toe-curlingly close himself.

Shane should have been satisfied with that. He should have stopped while they were ahead, and gotten them off like that, pressed close and wet and slick. No need to get fancy.

Instead Ryan looks up at him, drops of water on his eyelashes, the kind of visual Shane can’t say no to. He says, “Let me finish what I started,” and slides down Shane’s body and onto his knees on the floor of the shower. Shane tries not to think about how long it’s been since he scrubbed the shower.

“Okay, um. Don’t drown,” Shane says, because it seems, given precedent, that there might be a not-insignificant chance of that happening. If it comes off as a tepid endorsement of Ryan’s heretofore-undeveloped blowjob skills, well, it is.

Ryan takes Shane’s dick in his mouth again, with a determination that suggests he won’t be satisfied until he can do this properly. Shane uses his body to block most of the spray, ever a gentleman, and Ryan’s already getting the hang of it much better, going for steady rhythm and some excellent tongue action instead of attempting to deep-throat.

It’s pretty good, and then it’s _really_ good, and after a minute or two it abruptly rounds the corner into _too_ good. Shane tips from “in control” to “very much not in control” with stunning immediacy, and with almost no time to warn Ryan or do anything to prevent or stall it.  

“Fuck, Ryan, that’s so, I’m close, I’m—”

Ryan panics a little, still too tipsy to make decisions at a moment’s notice. At first he quickens his pace, like he’s committed to swallowing, but then Shane starts to actually come and he pulls back in alarm at the unfamiliar sensation. There’s come all over Ryan’s face, on his nose, and Ryan pulls back spluttering as Shane tries not to laugh in horror. _At least we’re already in the shower_.

“You came in my _eye_!” Ryan howls, clamping a hand over one eyeball and glaring up at Shane with the other one. “Holy shit, that burns. Jesus!”

“Not on purpose! I’m drunk, and you moved really fast,” Shane protests, keenly aware that he has now accidentally injured no fewer than two of Ryan’s body parts, three if you count his ego, in the last hour and a half alone. “Rinse it out!”

He pulls Ryan to his feet and shuffles around, trying to get Ryan into the shower spray to wash his face, and that’s when the slippery body wash— _Chekhov’s body wash_ , he thinks darkly, _back from the first act to muddy up the plot_ —gets its revenge.

Shane’s foot catches on a slippery patch of suds and just like that he’s going down, sliding helplessly against the slick shower floor. One leg stays stationary and one leg goes out, out, out, and gravity finishes the job and pulls him down. On the way down, he bashes his wrist against the rim of the tub trying to brace his fall.

“What the fuck is happening right now?” Ryan says. He surveys Shane, sprawled in a wet heap at his feet, his right eye all red from where he’s been pawing at it. Shane’s never gotten semen in his eye, but he bet it stings. His wrist stings, too.

This whole thing stings.

“Shower sex,” Shane says, deadpan. “It’s Debatable.”

*

They’re lying in Shane’s bed, side-by-side, fully clothed once more, and nobody’s saying a goddamn word. Ryan’s got ice on his nose, Shane’s got ice on his wrist.

“I could get you off again,” Shane offers, finally.

“ _Could you_ , though?” Ryan asks. “I’m—thanks. I think I’m good.” He sounds a little shell-shocked, his voice dull and carefully scrubbed of emotion.

Shane knows now, thanks to context clues and also _Ryan fucking telling him so_ , that this was Ryan’s first time with a guy ever. He’s not surprised by that, but he’s surprised by how little it seems to have mattered to his own drunk-ass self circa two hours ago. Shane’s not one to get precious about sex, and he’s not exactly Casanova himself, but this was _Ryan_.

He should have been less reckless. 

“This was—”

“I’m—”

Silence, again. Shane needs to drink some water and take some aspirin, or he’s going to have the worst fucking hangover in the morning, but he’s afraid that Ryan will spook like a horse if he makes any sudden moves. He wants to invite Ryan to stay over, so they can talk about this in the morning when they’re sober—but also the idea of facing Ryan tomorrow morning, after _this_ , fills him with dread.

It’s like a balloon has deflated inside Shane, a hope-filled one he didn’t even know he’d been steadily inflating these last few months with every glance or laugh tossed his way. This night hasn’t taken the edge off his _wanting_ at all—if anything it’s made it keener, he’s full of want even now with Ryan here next to him—but it’s taken all the possibility away.

Ryan clears his throat. “So, um, this was fun,” he lies through his perfect teeth. “I’ll, I’ve got breakfast at my parents’ place early tomorrow, so I should probably…go.”

“Okay,” Shane agrees, perhaps a little too eagerly. “I’ll order you a ride.” A man doesn’t come in his friend’s eye and then make that friend pay for his own ride home.

Ryan leans down to give him a perfunctory peck on the lips, which already feels super weird now that they’re clothed again.

“I’ll see you at work,” he says, but not like he’s looking forward to it.

“Text to let me know you get home okay?”

Shane lies in bed with his glasses off, still fully clothed, and stares at his phone for half an hour, but it doesn’t light up.

 _I’ve fucked it all up_ , he thinks. If he had been patient instead of greedy, if he had waited for the right time instead of the _now_ time, he could have made this good for Ryan, which is what Ryan deserved.

To have come so close to the thing he wants, only to realize he’s further from it than ever, is infinitely worse than the comfortable stasis of flirtation. He’s starting to realize already that even if this night had gone perfectly it would still have been a disaster for him personally; no-strings-attached sex with Ryan is never going to be a thing he can detach himself enough to enjoy.

The best friends-with-benefits sex in the world won’t satisfy Shane. His feelings will only eat at him from the inside, like MRSA, until there’s a giant hole in his chest where his heart used to be. Maybe in a way it’s a good thing that it went so badly, because now Ryan will take the decision out of his hands by running far and fast in the opposite direction.

Shane falls asleep in his jeans, wrist throbbing, mouth sour with stale booze. Ryan never texts.


	2. Chapter 2

Ryan wakes up in his own bed with a pounding headache. He doesn’t even remember the night before until he’s halfway through a giant hangover breakfast of eggs and bacon and he rubs at his eye, which is a little sore.

At that exact moment, as if Shane senses the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place from afar, Ryan’s phone chimes with a text:

 **Shane:** Get home ok last night? Sorry if I’m interrupting time with your family, just checking that you’re cool.

Ryan’s brain starts whirring out of control, remembering, as he types out a quick reply:

 **Ryan:** yeah i’m cool

It doesn’t quite sound like the text of a man who is cool, but it’s about the best Ryan can do on short notice and under these circumstances. It’s also a lie, because he’s not cool, he’s the furthest from cool. But the main thing, the important thing, is that it says “do not text me back.”

Being with Shane is something Ryan’s been thinking about for a while. Not in a serious, make-it-happen way; just in a hypothetical, exploratory, I’ve-already-got-my-hand-on-my-dick-so-why-not kind of way. It’s in the rotation.

When he imagined it, it was always _good_. Explosive. Spectacular, even. At work and in friendship, everything is easy with them. The back-and-forth of shooting comes easy, the jokes come easy. Ryan assumed, like a foolhardy idiot, this would be easy too, if they ever got around to it.

This is an unforeseen outcome. Ryan doesn’t care for it one bit, not least of all because he hates being bad at things. That goes double for things he thinks he ought to be good at, and after all this time, _Shane_ is one of those things.

One of his roommates rolls into the kitchen then, bare-chested and bed-headed, and starts shoveling some of Ryan’s extra breakfast into his mouth.

“You look like shit, bro,” he tells Ryan. “You got back late last night. I know you’re living that single life, but hooking up and bailing is a real fuckboy move.”

“Ungrateful to say that while hoovering down the food I made for you,” Ryan grouses. He ignores the second part, which hits a little too close to home.

“Why is your eye all red? If you give us pinkeye I’ll never forgive your nasty ass.”

Ryan considers saying, “A dude with bad aim came on my face,” just to see what Roland will say, but instead he mutters “Eyelash” and abandons his plate for the sanctity of his bedroom. Usually Ryan would be content to spend a Saturday hanging out with his roommates, but today he needs to stew, to examine this thing from all angles until it makes sense to him again.

*

On Monday morning, Ryan arrives a good half an hour late because he figures it’s better to be able to scope out the landscape of the office when he walks in, check who’s already there and where they might be lurking.

Unfortunately, Shane seems to have had the same idea, because they run into each other in the parking lot.

“Morning.” Pretending not to see Shane isn’t an option. The man’s six foot four, you can always see him coming.

“Morning,” Shane says, and he smiles but it looks more like a grimace, like he’s baring his teeth in the approximation of friendliness. He’s got an Ace bandage on his wrist.

They walk in silence for the door, and they’re almost there when Ryan says, “So, how—”

“Whoops, forgot my lunch!” Shane turns on his heel and speed-walks back to his car.  

“—are you?” Ryan asks the empty air. He’d been wondering exactly how bad this would be, how awkward and for how long. There’s the first part of his question answered, at least: it’s going to be bad. He’s still not sure how he feels about it all or if he regrets it, exactly, but he does regret the timing. They’re supposed to film their first Postmortem Q&A of the new season this morning.

Filming goes exactly as well as Ryan expects it to go, which is to say it’s a disaster. Mark and TJ watch them from behind the camera, tight-lipped and confused, as joke after joke falls flat or dies on the vine. Shane’s mouth is a grim line, uncrackable by a smile for Ryan or anyone else. He looks like his dog died.

Near the end of the filming, Ryan’s fed up enough to ask with deliberate obtuseness, “So what happened to your hand, man? Rough weekend?”

It’s stupid of him to poke at this sorest of spots, but he wants to see what Shane will say in front of Mark and TJ and the camera. He wants to force a reaction because it’s better than the blank nothingness Shane’s giving him now, this chilly no-energy slog of misery.

Shane stares at him for a long moment, and Ryan thinks maybe Shane will yell at him. Even the yelling would be an improvement.

“Just a regrettable alcohol-fueled accident,” Shane says. To the camera he adds, “Nothing worth talking about. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

 _A regrettable alcohol-fueled accident_. That one, Ryan thinks, is going to stick with him. The idea that Shane has catalogued Ryan in his mind that way makes embarrassed tears prickle in his eyes, so he has to turn away and pass his forearm over them quickly. He’s surprised by their suddenness, by how affected he is, but at least that will guarantee they can’t use the question in the edit.

“Cut,” TJ says, his voice sharp. “Okay, I guess that’s what we’re working with this week, then. Thanks, guys. We’ll do the Daga later this afternoon.”

Shane looks like he’s going to say something to Ryan, but then he thinks better of it. He gets up and leaves without another word, and Ryan lets him go. Mark follows, to take the footage to editing. TJ stays right where he is, perched on the edge of a table against the far wall of the room, legs swinging in what Ryan perceives to be a judgmental way.

“Wow are _you_ stupid.”

 Yup, nailed it.

“Excuse me?” Ryan asks.

“You heard me. Just, you know, _fix it_. Weird vibes in here. The pigtail-pulling I can handle, I’m numb to it at this point, but they don’t pay me enough for this.”

“Why do you assume I did something?”

“I’m psychic,” TJ says, stretching.

“Seriously.”

“I saw your drunk asses leave the bar on Friday. Pretty weird vibes in there, too. Different weird. Sexy.” TJ gives a delicate little shudder and hops off the table. “Look, I really don’t think he meant it like that.”

Ryan opens his mouth to argue, but to his horror the tears start welling up again before he can figure out where to start. His memories of the early part of the evening are still a blur. It hadn’t even occurred to him that they might have made a spectacle of themselves in front of coworkers, that maybe the whole office already knows or guesses.

It adds a new layer to the dread building inside him, which is turning into one of those monstrous Tasty creations where they pile one hundred crepes into a huge cake formation, not because they should but because they _can_.

“I dunno, Teej, it was. It didn’t go great.”

TJ jams his headphones back over his ears, even though they’re no longer connected to anything. “La la la, nope, I don’t need to know! Just fix it!” 

TJ speed-walks out of the room, headphone aux cable dragging behind him, and Ryan is left alone with his thoughts—his very least favorite place to be, but painfully familiar in a _hello darkness my old friend_ kind of way.

Usually Ryan likes his job, even on the frustrating days, even on the days when the stress level’s over his ears and ten people need something from him. Today all his thoughts are poisoned against him, and even routine interactions come out feeling cock-eyed and warped.

Ryan senses Shane around every corner, and the need to avoid him is so strong that Ryan almost makes some excuse to go home midday. Every place he looks is a place Shane has been, a place where they’ve laughed together or filmed or conquered a particularly tricky edit.

He eats lunch alone in the canteen. When he gets back to his desk, Shane’s chair is empty and his bag is gone. He doesn’t return all afternoon, to Ryan’s relief, and Ryan skulks out at 4:30 feeling like trash.

*

TJ was no help at all, although Ryan suspects TJ wasn’t trying to help so much as delivering a warning and some narrative unease, his own personal one-man Greek chorus. Ryan needs to talk to someone who’s unreservedly in his corner, someone he can trust. Preferably someone whose face he doesn’t have to see around the office all day every day.

He calls Daysha, whose verdict on Shane has ranged from “sweet but boring” to “dumb white boy” to “so tall as to be untrustworthy,” and who he knows he can count on for an honest response.

Her phone rings and rings and rings, but she doesn’t pick up.

“It’s Daysha, bitch! Leave a message.”

Ryan hopes she has a separate work number for professional calls.

“Hi, um. I’m having sort of a, I guess you could call it a relationship emergency? I don’t know, it’s not a relationship, it’s just a thing, and you’ve got a podcast about that so I guess you’re the expert on…things. Geez, this is bad. Anyway I need advice and I didn’t know who else to call. I’m sorry this is so stupid. Bye. Oh, um, this is Ryan. Bergara.”

Great. Really smooth.

Daysha calls him back immediately, because she’s a good friend and an absolute sucker for gossip.

“Tell Auntie Daysha all your troubles,” she says. “This is great, I feel like you never call me in crisis. Usually you only text to brag about how great your life is, Mister Executive Producer.”

“I can’t believe you screened my call. I’m hurt. Betrayed by another person I thought was a friend.”    

“I’m driving, don’t give me lip. _Another_ person?” she asks, curious.

Ryan tells her the whole sad sorry tale, leaving out the details because living it once was bad enough, and because he doesn’t think anybody should be stuck with those kinds of mental images if they haven’t done anything wrong.

Daysha laughs at him for a full two minutes. She _howls_ , and just when it sounds like she’s petering out she starts back up again. Ryan waits her out; this is, he understands, the price he has to pay for the genuinely good advice he’ll get on the other side of it.

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to shit where you eat?” she asks, when she’s finally finished. “Couldn’t you fire up Grindr like every other curious horndog in the greater L.A. area? Men are canceled.”

“I didn’t want a hook-up, I wanted to hook up with _him_. Stop laughing, I know you don’t get the appeal, you’ve said it five times. And now I’ve screwed it all up by being the worst ever at fucking, which is, ugh, humiliating.”

That sets her off again.

“I really doubt you were the worst ever,” she says eventually. “But you’d never done it before, and you were both drunk as skunks. Of course you were gonna suck. How bad we talking here?”

Ryan thinks back. Parts of the night are still a blur, but he remembers that the making out was great. He remembers Shane under him, breathing hard and grinding up into him, and that was good. That was _too_ good, he seems to recall, and the tips of his ears burn at the memory.

And then there are the things he thinks could have been great, if he hadn’t been so nervous. He remembers the feel of Shane stretching his mouth, heavy on his tongue—how much he’d liked it, and how much he couldn’t find the words to tell Shane so, and how hard he’d worked to not make Shane uncomfortable with his newness to it all.

“It wasn’t all bad.”

“Well, then, it’ll be fine. You fucked and it went weird, happens all the time. You both need a little time to lick your wounds and get over yourselves, so stop catastrophizing.”

“He wouldn’t even look at me today. After we filmed he fled so fast I could see his legs spinning like the Roadrunner. He almost knocked Mark over.”

“Yeah, ‘cause he’s _embarrassed_. You trusted him with something and he whiffed it. Just take your shirt off again and he’ll change his tune in a hurry. I know how much you like to show off those—”

“No, don’t you dare.”

Daysha laughs again. Ryan thinks maybe she’s pulled her car over so she can really give herself over to it, big full-bodied laughs at his expense on the side of a road somewhere.

“Tell you what,” she says, when she’s done. “You need some boots on the ground. I’m calling in reinforcements to be the me where I can’t be.”

“What? No, you can’t tell anybody. Daysha, promise me you won’t tell any—"

“I won’t promise, love you, it’ll all be fine, bye!”

She hangs up, and Ryan’s left to stare at his phone. He doesn’t know how to explain to her or anyone else the way Shane looked at him today, fractured, uncomfortable with faint undertones of pity, and the exact degree to which he can’t live with that.

There is one thing, though—one bright spot. Daysha’s reminded him that it wasn’t all bad, that there were good parts he’s forgotten by dwelling on the escalating catastrophes. If Ryan squints, if he tilts his head and imagines, he can picture a version of Friday night that ends differently. He can see how good it could be, if he can lose the nerves.

That’s something that could be worth putting up a fight for, instead of rolling over and calling it now. He just has to figure out how to convince Shane.

*

The next morning Ryan slinks into work again. He needn’t have bothered, because Shane’s sent the Unsolved team an email saying he’s sick. Ryan knows that by sick Shane actually means _conflict avoidant_ , but if he can get a little work done it’s no skin off his nose.

Ryan manages to have a fairly productive morning, but at about 11:30 he becomes aware of Curly standing off his left shoulder. Lurking.

Ryan gets a sinking feeling in his stomach. _Daysha, you snitch_.

“Hey, baby boy,” Curly says, and his voice is a lot quieter than usual. A kinder, gentler Curly. Maybe Ryan looks so punctured that even Curly’s toning it down out of respect for his dying sense of self-worth. “Let’s go get lunch. My treat.”

Ryan wants to say he can’t, that he’s got a lot of work to do, but Curly’s got a determined look on his face that says he won’t take no for an answer. Ryan shuts his computer off and lets himself be led by the elbow out the door, and then he follows Curly to a little hole-in-the-wall taqueria that their coworkers don’t frequent because there’s a better one three blocks closer to the office.

On the way there, Curly keeps up a steady stream of gossip and good-natured complaining—about the heat, his new shoes rubbing blisters on his feet, the guy he was supposed to meet up with over the weekend who ghosted him. Ryan nods and makes sympathetic noises, which is about all his brain can handle, until they have piles of tacos and a couple of Jarritos between them and Curly falls silent.

“So this is Daysha’s fault, right?” Ryan asks.

Curly pulls out his phone and pulls up a text conversation by way of an answer.

 **Daysha** : Bergara has boy problems, go be my eyes and ears.

 **Curly** : boy???!? problems?

 **Daysha** : Be nice!

 **Curly** :  i’m _always_ nice

 **Daysha** : Don’t be _that_ nice.

 **Curly** _:_ i’ve had dreams that started this way

Ryan laughs in spite of himself.

“As you can imagine, this is something of a _run, don’t walk_ situation for me,” Curly says, taking a swig of his soda.

“How much did she tell you?”

“Just that you tried it on with some guy and it didn’t go very well. She seemed to think you might have logistical questions. What went wrong?”  

It’s really warm in this taqueria all of a sudden. Ryan’s not prepared to have this conversation with a coworker in between bites of too-chewy carne asada.

“I don’t know. I thought we had chemistry, and sometimes it seemed like it was going well. But we were drunk and I was, you know, bad at it, and we kept falling over and injuring ourselves and…”  Ryan shrugs and shoves a taco in his mouth whole, to have something to do with his hands and mouth while Curly processes this.

“But did you _like_ it?” Curly asks. “It’s not a requirement for gainful employment at Buzzfeed that you have to like dick. I’m more than happy to like it enough for everybody, honey.”

Ryan considers this, chewing.

“I would have liked it more if I hadn’t been so in my head about it, and he could tell I was freaked out, and that sucked. I really, um. I like this guy, and if I still like him after that I must like him a lot.”

“Who is it? Someone I know?”

“I can’t—I’m not gonna to tell you that.”

Curly scrutinizes him and Ryan waits, resigned, for the other shoe to drop. Curly’s not stupid, and he must realize it’s someone he knows or else Ryan wouldn’t be so cagey. He must have noticed that Shane’s not at work. He probably saw the wrist brace.

Sure enough: “Holyyyy shit.”

Ryan sighs. Curly pushes the tacos out of the way and lets his head gently come down to rest on the table with a little _thump_ , hair splaying out on the tabletop in all directions.

“Shut up, okay, he won’t even look at me—”

Curly holds up a single finger, and he doesn’t lift his head off the table. “He looks at you plenty. I just, I need a minute with this, _querido_. Let me file this one away for later.”

“You’re gross.”

“I’m not gross, I’m like a proud papá. I mean, I’m also gross, but this is some student-surpasses-the-master level shit and I haven’t even started teaching you yet. Did you grab the tallest man you could find, or what?”

“Why, is that extra credit?”

“Only if the inches correlate elsewhere,” Curly says with a wink, and then he laughs when Ryan looks away in silent, embarrassed confirmation. “Trust me, the chemistry _isn’t_ the problem. What do you usually do when you’re bad at something? Like, how do you get good at it?”

“I don’t,” Ryan says glumly. “I just never do it ever again, and that way I don’t have to face the fact that I’m a failure.”

“Wrong answer!” Curly looks excited now, properly thrilled, and that makes Ryan nervous. “If at first you don’t succeed, you watch some freaky videos, you practice with some toys, and you try, try again.”

“I don’t know that parable,” Ryan says. At the word _toys_ he stops hearing properly; the whole world fades away, replaced by a loud buzzing in his ears. It must show on his face, because Curly snickers and clinks his glass bottle against Ryan’s.

“I’m trying to give you a big gay pep talk here,” Curly says. “Buck up. Get back on that very leggy horse.”

“I—Jesus Christ.”

They finish off the pile of tacos, Curly peppering in bits of horrifying wisdom and his own bad sex stories in an attempt to make Ryan feel better. It works, a little. Ryan’s starting to suspect he’s gotten complacent with women; rote, lazy, which is bad in its own, less obvious way.

Maybe he’s been looking at this all wrong. Maybe this is an opportunity.

 _I don’t want to be bad at sex_ , he thinks. _I don’t want to be bad at sex with_ Shane _, with whom I am good at everything else_. _This will not stand_.

*

The next day Shane comes back to work, and things slide back into a rhythm that could almost pass for normal to anyone who doesn’t know them. They learn how to be in the same room together for stretches of time, to work side-by-side without one or the other of them cringing away or actively fleeing the room. That’s progress.

By the end of the week, Ryan can almost look Shane in the eye. He can _almost_ see Shane’s lanky body loping down the hall and think about something other than what Shane looks like naked and hard under him.

On Thursday, a package arrives for Ryan at work in a discreet brown box, although he doesn’t remember ordering anything. He takes it back to his desk, and he’s about to tear into it with scissors when he gets a Slack direct message from Curly.

 **Velasquez, Curly:** STOP RIGHT THERE MISTER you’re gonna be a very unhappy camper if you open that at work.

 **Bergara, Ryan S.** : oh my god what did you do

 **Velasquez, Curly** : consider it a gift from the welcome wagon. hmu if you’ve got qs

 **Bergara, Ryan S.** : i will not.

Ryan takes the package home and dumps it on his kitchen table while he makes and inhales three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinks two beers. Then he remembers he’s got nosy roommates, so he scurries up to his room with the package. He sets it at the foot of his bed and stares at it for a while, like he might be able to see through the box to the contents it contains.

It’s a little like Schrödinger's cat: until he opens the box, Ryan doesn’t know what’s in there. Not for sure. It could be sex toys, but it could also be _not_ sex toys. It’s a quantum paradox, simultaneously dildos and the absence of dildos, and Ryan’s afraid to bust open the packing tape and obliterate the uncertainty.

He opens the box.

Yup, those are sex toys.

He closes the box.

Ryan shoves the box under his bed and he goes to take a shower. He washes his hair twice, just for something to do. Then he returns to his room, towel wrapped around his waist, dripping all over his comforter, and digs the box out from under the bed again.

*

Ryan knows the fans make fun of his research process, such as it is, but he takes it seriously. He can’t afford to spend as much time as he wants researching episodes; he only has time to do _enough_ and then pass it off to the research team for fact-checking and finessing. If he had his way he could fall down rabbit holes for hours or days, chasing details that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, wrapping everything up with a bow.

So, because this weekend he’s got nothing but time, that’s what he does. He tells his roommates he’s not feeling well, withdraws to his bedroom, and gets into it. _It_ being fake dicks, and the real dicks they aspire to imitate.

Along with the box, Curly’s sent an email to his personal Gmail with some links, and Ryan starts there because they alarm him less than the toys. He’s not a complete novice to gay porn as a genre—sometimes you see some stuff by accident when you’re clicking around, and sometimes you see some stuff on purpose that you’re pretending to see by accident—but to his surprise that’s not where the links lead. They’re educational videos, most led by a charmingly game woman who wants everybody to fuck better.

“This is stupid,” Ryan says out loud to nobody, but he clicks play on the first video anyway. And the second, and the third, and before he knows it it’s two pm and he’s got several pages of notes in his notebook.

The next day—Sunday, the Lord’s day, the day of rest—Ryan returns to the box armed with fresh knowledge and high hopes. Is he weirded out that Curly took the liberty of ordering for him? Absolutely. Is he glad he didn’t have to pick from the frankly overwhelming options? Also true.

He pulls out the dildo. It’s silicone and realistic, maybe seven inches, and if Curly was taking an educated guess he got pretty close to the mark. Ryan doesn’t know why this should be so weird when he had the real thing in his mouth a week ago, but it is. He lets his hand slide along the length.

The feel under his palm isn’t quite right, and of course there’s no heat to it, no reaction, but if he closes his eyes he’s flooded by vivid sense memories that helpfully fill in the blanks.

Ryan eyes the bottle of lube and the training plug set. Thanks to the videos he knows what to do with those, now, and there’s something appealing about the prospect of the _challenge_. He imagines it might be like adding more weight on the bench at the gym: the endorphin rush of getting your body to do what you want it to do, of making it work for you instead of you working for it. That’s something he knows he loves already.

Ryan imagines a training montage set to “Eye of the Tiger” in which he inserts larger and larger fake dicks in himself to rounds of cheering applause and then, after removing said dicks, he does a victory run up the _Rocky_ steps.

And that’s…it’s weird, but in service of a proper seduction— _the thrill of the fight!_ he thinks with a touch of hysteria—there might be something to it. If dudes are going to be a thing that he does now, he’s going to do it right.

He comes spectacularly, the middle-sized plug inside him and a lube-sticky hand on his cock, thinking about Shane’s hand around them both in the shower, how the water rolled down Shane’s nose as he watched Ryan’s face so intently. About the way Shane kissed him the very first time, full of wonder and care, like he’d been wanting to do it for a while. Like Ryan was someone special and not just someone to get off with.

So there’s that too.

*

The next morning Ryan shows up at the office with a spring in his step. He refuses, he absolutely _refuses_ , to be defeated by a gallon of tropical tiki drinks, a bad case of nerves, and gravity. He’s put literal years into this flirtation, letting it age like a fine wine, and he’s not ready to give up on it because they accidentally cracked into the barrel too soon.

“Good morning!” he chirps as he drops his stuff on his desk, and Shane looks up at him with suspicion. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Gonna be hot again,” Shane mutters.

“Another scorcher!” That’s a dumb, suburban dad thing to say, but Ryan can’t always control himself around Shane. He opens his mouth and stupid shit pours out of it and he’s helpless to prevent any of it. “How about joining me for lunch today, big guy?”

It’s the first time either of them has suggested they spend any amount of quality alone time together since their ill-fated night, and he can tell Shane’s about to make up an excuse on reflex. Ryan gives Shane the most big-eyed, bare-faced look of sincerity that he can muster.

“Yeah, okay,” Shane agrees, but he still doesn’t seem sure about it. “I’ve got a meeting at eleven, so right after that?”

“It’s a date,” Ryan says, and watches with satisfaction as pink blooms on Shane’s cheeks and creeps down his neck. He remembers Daysha’s advice and raises his arms above his head in a big stretch, deliberately letting his shirt ride up his stomach above his belly-button. Shane’s eyes are drawn there, his gaze lingers too long, and Ryan bites back a smile. _Gotcha_.

When he wanders into the canteen at about noon, Shane’s already there, sitting in the corner with a banana and some Greek yogurt with granola.

“That’s not a lunch, that’s baby food.”

Shane swirls his spoon around the cup, mixing it all together to soften the granola. “Just you wait. You’ll wake up one day, in the not-too-distant future, and realize you can’t eat like a bottomless pit anymore and still look like that. And on that day I’ll be waiting to laugh in your face.”

“I don’t know what you mean, look like that,” Ryan says innocently. He knows he’s fishing, and Shane knows it too because he rolls his eyes to the ceiling.

“Okay, Ryan. _I don’t know what you mean_ ,” he mimics. “My scrawny ass you don’t. I’ve never known a man with your particular brand of self-conscious vanity.”

“I seem to recall you making up for the scrawny ass in other ways,” Ryan says, ignoring the dig.

“Oh, so we’re talking about this now?”

Ryan grabs for Shane’s banana and takes a bite out of it. In his head it was sexy, but he realizes as he’s chewing that it might hit a little close to home. Shane must be remembering the same thing, because he blanches and looks away.

“Sorry, too soon?”

“I’m having a Pavlovian response to the flash of your teeth around a phallic object,” Shane says. “And now my balls are trying to crawl back inside my body. Something tells me that’s not what you were going for.”

“No,” Ryan agrees, still chewing.

“I’m not going to flirt with you,” Shane says, taking a sip of his water, at the same time as Ryan says, “Curly gifted me a dildo.”

Shane chokes on the water, slapping the table and coughing some up by accident. Ryan hops up to grab some napkins, and to hide his red face for a minute. It wasn’t what he’d been planning to say, right here in the canteen where coworkers could hear, but with Shane sometimes the planning goes out the window. Ryan’s always leading with his dick or his heart, leaving his brain to stumble along behind.

“You can’t _say things like that_ ,” Shane hisses, mopping up the water. “People are _eating_. What am I supposed to do with that information, anyway?”

“I think we should try again. I don’t think we gave it a fair shot. The ol’, you know, the ol’ college try.”

“Yeah, I thought this might…sometimes you’ve got to know when to call it, Ryan,” Shane says. He looks weary, bone-tired all of a sudden. His face is strained with some emotion Ryan doesn’t recognize, and it’s not a happy one. “Sometimes the things you think are a good idea when you’re drunk and horny just…aren’t.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember the good parts, tucked in around the—”

“The horror? The unrelenting comedy of errors? The bodily harm?”

“That’s being a little dramatic,” Ryan says, which he knows is rich coming from him, given his natural tendency to histrionics. He can see that all of Shane’s walls are up, carefully rebuilt taller and stronger than they were before.

Ryan could, in theory, step away right now. They’d be okay. They’d skirt around each other for a while, more carefully solicitous than they used to be, too polite, and then the passage of weeks and months would chip away at their awkwardness until all was more or less like it was before.

But it wouldn’t be enough for him. Ryan’s learned a lot this week, about the things he wants and the things he can’t do without. Ryan wants to drive a bulldozer right through all the excuses until Shane’s defenses are rubble at his feet. He wants to take down the whole structure with a targeted blast, and rebuild something new and shiny and _super-duper gay_ in its place.

He leans in, close and quiet, so only Shane can possibly hear him.

“Yesterday I had a plug up my ass and when I came around it, all I could think about was how I wished it was you. I’ve done a lot of research, and I think it would be a shame to waste it. So, you know, think about it.” 

Shane’s mouth falls open, but no words come. Ryan leaves Shane where he found him, alone in the canteen, shifting in his seat, pupils blown wide and dark in brown eyes. Ryan can see the arousal all over his face, warring with that other, more complicated thing.

 _Boom_ , _baby_.


	3. Chapter 3

Shane is being wooed. Courted. No, neither of those words are quite right, implying as they do a certain degree of gentlemanly behavior or a level of romantic intention.

_Seduced_. Seduced is the word.

Somewhat inelegantly seduced, it’s true, because this is Ryan they’re talking about. But still, Shane’s not sure he’s ever been pursued with this sort of blind determination. It would be charming if it didn’t make every single square inch of his heart ache with the futility of it, if he didn’t know that this is more about how much Ryan hates to admit defeat than it is about him specifically.

The next morning, Ryan walks into the office wearing the tightest t-shirt Shane’s ever seen him in and drops a cup of coffee on Shane’s desk. It’s got SHANE <3 scrawled across the side in bright red Sharpie.

“What’s this?” Shane asks.

“It’s coffee.”

“Thanks, I made it that far. What’s with the annotation?”

Ryan shrugs. “Barista must have though my name was Shane. Maybe she wanted to break off a piece of this.” He flexes his arm, and Shane watches with alarm as muscles spring into rolling motion, tugging the fabric taut.

“I have heard that women love a grown man in a child’s size medium slim-fit tee,” Shane agrees. The expression on Ryan’s face is uncomfortably canny, and Shane tries to convince himself that it doesn’t suit him.

“You’re welcome for the coffee,” Ryan says, and then he _winks_. What the fuck, that’s Shane’s move. Shane can’t believe Ryan has turned his own most potent weapon—possibly his _only_ weapon—against him. Ryan’s not even good at it. No subtlety, he projects the wink from a mile away and it’s broad as a door.                                            

“Okay, you can’t just—I mean—don’t do that if you’re not going to do it right. You’ve got to ease your way into it, you can’t go flinging them everywhere. What do you think you’re doing?”

Ryan watches him, arms folded over his chest. Shane’s used to having the upper hand around Ryan, if he’s honest. He doesn’t care at all for how the last few weeks have flipped the script, for this new flustered tongue-tied Shane whose quips won’t quip and whose facial features won’t arrange themselves into disinterest.

“Thanks for the hot tip,” Ryan says. “I already told you what I’m doing.” He wanders off in the general direction of the research team. As he walks past Shane’s desk, he reaches out to tousle Shane’s hair in a way that might look, from the outside, friendly. His fingers catch on a few strands of Shane’s hair and tug on the way back out.

*

The other thing about Ryan, or at least _another_ thing, is that he doesn’t really have a sense of scale. A normal human being might, at this point, have asked Shane out to dinner. But Ryan’s hyper-focused and goal-oriented, and right now his goal is to reclaim his sense of self from ego-destroying sex. It feels an awful lot like he’s got to something to prove to himself and he’s using Shane to do it.

Mid-week, Shane’s at home heating up some noodles for a late dinner when he gets a text from Ryan at nine o’clock on the dot.

**Ryan:** hey dude u up?

**Shane:** It’s only 9. What’s up.

A statement, not a question, because by now Shane knows incoming funny business when he sees it.

**Ryan:** okay so

**Ryan:** in exactly one hour, unless you tell me not to, i’m going to text you a pic

**Ryan:** (it’s gonna be my cock)

**Ryan:** so i want to stress again that if you don’t want that, you should reply to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE some time in the next 58 minutes and i will Not Do That

Shane has to put down his noodles, sit down on his couch, and closes his eyes. It’s just so perfectly Ryan: the desire to do something wild, tempered always by a fundamental self-conscious _un-wildness_. It’s conscientious and thoughtful, under a slick but _very_ thin veneer of devil-may-care.

It’s also rude as hell, in that it forces Shane to go on record one way or another instead of pretending none of this is happening. Ryan’s giving him the power to shut whole thing down right here with one text. Shane could do that, he could type UNSUBSCRIBE and Ryan would respect it. Shane would have put the matter to rest, and maybe then he could fucking sleep at night, and maybe eventually he’d be able to stop thinking of something other than Ryan and his terrible fucking blowjobs when he jerks off. That would be great.

On the other hand, then Shane wouldn’t get to see the picture. He hates himself for it, but he really wants to see the picture.

Shane finishes his noodles, and minutes pass. He does some dishes that have been piling up, and the time ticks away. He half-watches an episode of something on Netflix, he doesn’t even fucking remember what it is even as he’s still watching it, and he runs out the clock.

At three minutes to ten, run ragged by playing sext chicken for the last hour, Shane almost does it. He almost texts UNSUBSCRIBE. He picks up his phone, he starts to type, and then he erases. Starts to type, and erases again. Waits.

At ten o’clock on the dot, he gets a text from Ryan, with an attachment. Ryan’s always late, he’s _never_ on time. Shane wonders if he set an alarm on his phone as a reminder. _10:00 pm, text Shane a dick pic. 10:05 pm, brush your teeth._  

Shane takes a very deep breath. He doesn’t know why he’s built this up in his mind so much, why he’s got an anticipatory boner over this. It’s not like it’s anything he hasn’t seen before, and seen in _action_ , no less. Maybe he needs to jerk off more, to cut shit like this off at the pass.

He opens the attachment and it’s—it’s that _fucking_ picture of Ryan at Knott’s Berry Farm, sitting astride the giant rooster and looking the camera head on like he’s challenging all his Insta followers to make the obvious joke.

Shane throws his phone down on the couch. He tries to tell himself that it was a good bit. He can’t even chastise Ryan about it, because Ryan will point out (correctly) that he’s salty because he’s disappointed.

Ryan’s not the kind of person who can let a victory go by un-crowed-about. He can’t just take his W and be quietly pleased about it. He’s a rub-it-in sort of guy, so Shane’s not at all surprised when his phone dings again about ten minutes later. That, he knows, will be the gloating.

It’s not gloating. Or if it is, it’s the kind of gloating Shane’s body must reluctantly support, even as his mind roils against it.

It’s a picture of Ryan, leaning back against his headboard, taken from a high, flattering angle. He’s naked, underwear pushed out of frame, maybe around his knees. Head tipped back, hard dick flushed dark in the hand that isn’t holding his phone. If Shane looks closely—and he is, he so fucking is—he can see come pooling on Ryan’s stomach and clinging to his hand in sticky strings.

**Ryan:** that’s for being so patient

**Ryan:** night night

Shane becomes aware of a low hissing noise, and it takes him a few seconds to realize it’s _him_ , letting all the air out of his lungs in a slow leak like a bike tire punctured by a nail.

Shane also becomes aware that his hand is in his pants. He doesn’t remember putting it there, but there it is all the same, gripping his own dick. He’s too close to coming already, thanks to an hour and fifteen minutes of masterfully-built tension and thirty seconds of pure adrenaline. If ever there was a doubt Ryan’s an aficionado of the horror genre, there isn’t now.

_Well, since I’m here already_ , he thinks, still pretending his brain has any say in the matter whatsoever. He gets off in thirty seconds flat, unbothered by a need for lube or spit or anything but his own fast-moving hand and his eyes locked on his phone screen.

The second he comes, Shane’s disappointed with himself. The come-down is like getting off to some sketch porn and then immediately drowning in self-loathing the moment the orgasm’s over. This is not, he knows, what getting over someone looks like. This is whatever the opposite of self-care is.

He’s mad at Ryan, which is unfair because Ryan gave him an out that he was too weak to take, and because Ryan doesn’t understand that this isn’t really about the sex at all. He doesn’t get that what he’s offering—a do-over, Shane guesses, a second chance at a thing he shouldn’t have done in the first place—could never be enough for Shane.

This time it’s his turn to not text Ryan back.

*

They’re trying a new thing this week, filming the Postmortem on Friday instead of Monday. The Monday Postmortems haven’t been going great lately; nobody’s got the energy to answer dumb questions from the internet, Ryan can’t be bothered to seek out better ones, and they’re both too sleepy and down-in-the-dumps to get the banter up to par.

Fridays, though. Fridays at Buzzfeed are manic and joyful: free food everywhere, everybody filming their stupidest videos, people pulling out dumb items from the props closet to wear. It’s the kind of vibe that they think might feed well into the Postmortem, both of them still riding the high of the new episode’s release and hurriedly scrolling for the best questions they can find in under half an hour.

It also means they don’t have a lot of time to film when it’s all said and done. TJ’s vowed to run the room like a general to get them out of there by 5:30, but Shane will believe it when he sees it.

Ryan eases into his chair looking pretty sure of himself, though.

Filming proceeds pretty normally until about halfway through their pre-selected questions, when Ryan’s hand disappears underneath the table. Shane doesn’t notice at first, but it becomes evident pretty quickly because Ryan talks with his hands so much that he’s visibly thrown off his game by the inability to do so.

There’s also the part where Ryan’s other hand has landed on Shane’s knee, under the desk.

Shane makes a surprised little noise that he covers, not as smoothly as he might have liked, with a cough.

“Alright, here’s a question from Giuliana Nightingale—good name, like an Italian spy—straight outta ‘Gramtown,” Shane says. Does his voice sound wrong? Is it too high-pitched? He can’t even tell any more. Ryan’s hand inches up his leg, fingers spreading to cover more ground, fingertips wrapping around to brush Shane’s inner thigh.

“Good name,” Ryan agrees. His face is blank, neutral, like he’s never been guilty of anything in his whole damn life. “Is that like Straight Outta Compton?”

“Would you rather,” Shane reads, internally cursing himself when Ryan’s hand slides up to mid-thigh and his voice cracks on the word _rather,_ “be gutted by Jack the Ripper, have your mind wiped by the men in black, or be probed by aliens? U gotta pick one, love you both, hashtag shitfishallthewaybaby!”

Ryan whistles.

“Tough call there, Ms. Nightingale,” he muses. “I don’t really want to be gutted, obviously. Not least of all because all of Saucy Jack’s victims were prostitutes and I don’t think being a sex worker in Victorian London was a barrel full of monkeys. And it would suck to be mind-wiped because you’d forget about all your family and friends and—” his hand is perilously high up Shane’s thigh now, in dangerous territory, “— _loved ones_.”

“Hngh,” Shane says. He can feel how hot his face is, and he knows he must be blushing. Everybody must be able to tell, even if they don’t know why, and he bets that on camera he’s practically glowing.

“I guess I’ll take the ol’ probing,” Ryan says, like he’s talking himself into it, like it wasn’t a foregone conclusion given the options. His fingertips brush over Shane’s erection very lightly and Shane jumps in his seat. “Is that what you wanted to hear, you perverts?”

“In case all of you out there are wondering, Ryan chose this question.”

“It was a funny question!”

“Yeah, like you didn’t want another excuse to talk about weird alien butt stuff. It’s okay, Ryan, this is a safe space.”

And then, like it’s a punishment for his cheek, Ryan’s hand slides up to wrap all the way around Shane’s hard dick through his chinos. Shane’s leg twitches so hard he bangs his knee against the underside of the table, and his eyes swim with tears.

It’s torture, really—to be given the exact thing he wants, exactly the way he doesn’t want it, like it’s a game Ryan’s so determined to win that he’s too oblivious to notice Shane’s not even playing. _Thanks, I hate it_.

“I think I’d go with the mind-wiping,” Shane continues as best he can. “Sometimes I think it’d be nice to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. Forget all the bad stuff and just be new again.”

“You’d have to re-learn how to read and speak English and stuff too, though,” Ryan points out. He tightens his hand around Shane, one squeeze. Shane feels hot all over, burning up with it from the inside out.

Maybe this is what spontaneous combustion feels like, right before it happens. Maybe that’s what happened to Mary Reeser; she was groped by an insufferable hot person.

Shane opens his mouth to reply, but all that comes out is “Flergh?” He might need to re-learn how to speak English anyway, if he makes it out of this room alive, so that mind-wipe is seeming like a better and better option all the time.

“Okay, cut,” TJ snaps. He looks annoyed, not like it’s easy to tell with TJ. “That’s enough. Ryan, for fucksake, we can _see your hand_. Like, not on camera, but Mark and I are here in this room and we have eyes and we can _see you_.” 

Shane feels Ryan’s hand freeze. Then Ryan pulls his hand away, shaking it like he’s burned it on a hot pan.

“Shit, I thought the angle was—ugh. You said fix it!”

“This is you _fixing it_? Not what I meant, man! Mark, back me up here.” TJ rounds on Mark, who is mysteriously still filming. Maybe he’s just in the zone.

“Not what he meant, boys,” Mark agrees placidly. He’s _still rolling._ Maybe he’ll take it to Legal and sue for a hostile work environment. There are probably enough Buzzfeed employees for a class action lawsuit, if they want.

“Ryan, does that look like the face of a man who’s having a fun, sexy time?” TJ asks, like he’s furious he has to be having this conversation. “Seriously, look at his _face_. If you had any idea what kind of shitty position you’re putting us in right now—"

Shane can feel Ryan’s eyes on him, as TJ instructed. He chances a glance over, and all the color’s leaking out of Ryan’s own face with the realization that he’s gone too far, that Shane’s _not_ particularly having a good time. He looks horrified.

Mark starts packing up the camera. “TJ, let’s let them…we can do this Monday.”

“Shane?” TJ asks, and then Shane realizes TJ’s asking for permission to leave, to leave him here _alone_ _with Ryan,_ like Ryan’s some threat to him or a predator or something. Ryan’s sunk so low in his chair that he might fall off it at any moment. Shane doesn’t know how this got so mixed up so quickly, except that he’s been pathologically non-confrontational.

“Yeah, it’s fine, Teej,” Shane says. “Ryan, it’s _fine_.”

Ryan waits until the door clicks shut behind Mark and TJ to say anything at all.

“Oh my god, I’m—I’m so fucking sorry, I thought. Just say the word and I’ll go to HR right now and—”

“Chill out, Ryan. It really is okay. I should have talked to you weeks ago like an adult instead of avoiding you and hoping very hard in your general direction that you’d figure out what I was thinking.”  

“The picture—you didn’t text ‘unsubscribe’. I thought you, I thought we, I thought you were _into this_ ,” Ryan says, the embarrassment and shame written all across his face. He gets up and starts walking the room, the way he always does when he’s trying to work out a problem and he’s got too much kinetic energy to contain sitting down.

And it’s tough, because Shane demonstrably _is_ into it. His body is so, so into it. He doesn’t know how to explain to Ryan, without coming off like a big whiny baby about the whole thing, that the flesh is willing to give it another go, but the heart is achy and afraid and old before its time.

“It’s not like that,” Shane says with a sigh. There’s a migraine starting behind his eyes, making his vision go fuzzy. “Ryan, when all this went down, I was so surprised that you…that it was happening at all that I made shitty choices. And as a direct result of those choices, we almost self-destructed this whole thing we’ve been busting our asses on for years.”

Shane gestures around the room at the Unsolved set, at the stupid horse’s head bust, at the post-its on his desk and the creepy mannequin and the notes from fans.

“I don’t know how to be casual with you. I flirted with you for, for _years_ , because I never thought there was the slightest chance you’d…and then the very first chance I got, I fucked it all up.”

“I think we fucked it up together. But if at first you don’t succeed—”

“You’re not listening to me, man. I can’t play at this. I’m not going to fall into bed with you a second time because you can’t stand being bad at something. I’m not a mountain you can stick a flag into, or something for you to cross off the old to-do list.”

Shane winces at the bitterness that’s crept into his voice as he puts words to his biggest fear. Some part of Ryan might genuinely want him, but mostly he thinks that Ryan just can’t bear _losing_. That Ryan’s embarked on this stupid mission to conquer dick, not because he wants to but because he’s being eaten away by new insecurities.

Shane can be a lot of things for Ryan—a reassuring presence, a cheerleader, a sounding board for ideas, a grounding when the weirdness of internet fame becomes too much—but he can’t be that. He can’t offer up his own well-being as a temporary patch for an unsolvable problem.

Ryan’s not pacing any more, he’s just standing and staring. He looks bewildered and hurt, and Shane wishes he could have prevented that but he doesn’t know how. It couldn’t be any plainer from the look on Ryan’s face that he’s been blindsided, that he came in here expecting to play a flirty game only to discover that he didn’t know the rules or the stakes.

“I don’t think you’re a mountain, or a task, or—there’s a lot of metaphors flying around right now, I can’t—”

Shane takes a deep breath. He tries to think of a way to explain himself that will make Ryan understand.

“Okay. Imagine you spend like two years craving chocolate cake, but you can’t have the cake, and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to have it for…for reasons. But it’s okay, because as long as you don’t think too hard about the cake, you can eat other stuff and be perfectly content.”

“Why can’t I just make myself a cake?”

“I don’t know, maybe all the world’s cocoa plants die or something. Maybe it’s an unsustainable industry built on wage slavery. Maybe you’re doing keto. Anyway, so you’ve resigned yourself to never having chocolate cake, and then someone offers you a slice out of the blue and in a moment of weakness you eat it.”

“Wait, am I the cake?”

Shane ignores him.

“So you eat the cake, right, and maybe it doesn’t taste quite as good as you expected, and maybe there’s some crucial ingredient missing and you feel a little queasy the next day, but it’s still _cake_.”

“Maybe I had unrealistic expectations for the cake,” Ryan says, frowning. “Maybe the person who baked the cake had never made cake before and he was _trying his best_.”

“Again, this isn’t actually about the quality of the cake. It’s about how you weren’t supposed to eat the cake, but you ate it anyway, and now all you want to do is eat chocolate cake all goddamn day like the poor fat kid from Matilda.”

Ryan’s frown deepens. Shane can practically see his wheels spinning. “Dropping all this hypothetical bullshit, it’s not that you don’t want the cake. It’s that you want the cake _too much_?”

Shane nods, because that’s close enough to true.

“I had the cake once and I can walk away from it, because it was only so-so cake. And in a way that was lucky, because if I have the cake again and it’s great cake, like really first-class, heart-stoppingly good cake, it’ll ruin me for other food and I’ll starve to death once I can’t have it anymore.”

It’s truly amazing, Shane reflects, the lengths he will go to in order to avoid saying that one simple phrase that he’s afraid will break everything he’s worked so hard to build: _I can’t have casual sex with you again, because I have feelings for you, and you don’t feel that way._

But Ryan isn’t an idiot, he just plays one on TV, so when he says _Shane_ very quietly, Shane knows he hasn’t been distracted by all the elaborately-woven metaphors.

“Shane. Is it really that hard for you to believe that I might also want cake?”

“Yes,” Shane says, and he curses himself for how shaky he sounds, how open and raw. When he looks at Ryan’s face, he sees an expression that he thinks must more or less mirror his own: cracked-open and cautious, and strangely at odds with this place where they spend so much of their time joking and laughing.

“I’m really sorry,” Ryan says, “if I’ve seemed flippant. Like, I wanna run to the top of the _Rocky_ steps, but it was never only about the thrill of the fight for me.”

Shane doesn’t know what to make of this nonsensical aside one way or the other, so he closes his eyes and lets himself pretend to be somewhere else—a lonely beach, maybe. He can almost hear the palm trees rustling in the breeze, the water lapping at his feet.

“I don’t know what that means,” Shane says, his eyes still shut tight. “There are days, _since_ , when you’re all I think about. I need that to not be the case. I need you to back off.”

Shane opens his eyes again, and Ryan’s very close to him all of a sudden, looming over him the way he can only do when he’s standing and Shane is sitting. 

“I’ll leave you alone,” Ryan promises. “If I’d known, I’d have never.”

“I know,” Shane says.

“But I do think it’s worth reminding you that I wanted the cake so much I practically came in my pants over it. If you ever figure out how to believe that, you know where to find me.”

Then, having used Shane’s own metaphor against him, Ryan leans down and presses the most chaste of kisses to the corner of Shane’s mouth. He pulls away immediately, and it’s like he was never there at all.

*

True to his word, Ryan’s short-lived, exciting, excruciating pursuit ends immediately. Even though he requested it Shane still misses it, the way he might miss his own finger if somebody cut it off, but he can’t deny that his life becomes easier. He gets a little space back in his head for things that aren’t Ryan, which is necessary because he has other things to tend to, a job and family and a life.

It's all very mature, and sensible, and nobody has any fun at all but nobody wants to throw themselves off a bridge either. Most days that feels like an improvement to Shane. It feels like being able to get air again.

Ryan overcorrects at first, gives Shane too much space. There are stretches where he’ll only see Ryan for filming. Shane doesn’t know where he’s getting most of his work done; he works from home sometimes, and Shane sees him by the Pero Like desks a lot, but all he knows for sure is that there are whole days where he only sees Ryan on Instagram.

_This isn’t what I meant._

Shane’s in the VO booth one morning, recording voiceover for the upcoming and still-secret season of Ruining History, when the door opens and slams shut behind him. It’s not a huge booth, and Curly’s exploding ponytail of hair seems to be taking up most of it.

Curly starts with a string of Spanish Shane mostly doesn’t understand, peppered with some English he _does_ understand (“fucking morons” and “Why do I have to do everything around here,” for example, come in crystal clear).

“¿Qué haces, _papi_?” Curly asks, or rather demands.

“I’m recording voiceover,” Shane says, although this would seem to be self-evident. He doesn’t think he’s done anything to deserve a _papi_ , either to Curly or to anybody else, but that’s neither here nor there.

“What are you doing,” Curly repeats, “that’s got Bergara hiding in the Pero Like corner like a puppy someone kicked? Like a puppy _you_ kicked.”

“This is really none of your business, dude.”

“He made it my business, _dude_ ,” Curly says, adopting an aggressively flat, Midwestern speech pattern. “Or, well, Daysha made it my business, and Ryan made it her business, ergo it is my business. Transitive property of nosiness.”

He leans against the door in a way that suggests neither of them will be leaving through it until he gets the answer he’s looking for. Shane should really be updating his resume. Everybody here is terrible about professional boundaries. This is what happens when your office has open-concept floorplans.

“He’s giving me space, because I asked for space.”

“Why did you ask for space when we all know perfectly goddamn well that what you want is literally zero space? You’d live in that boy’s pocket if you could.”

Shane pulls a face he’s not sure Curly can see in the dim lighting of the booth. “It’s a lot more complicated than that. We want different things.”

“Different things my ass,” Curly shoots back. “Don’t think I don’t see your moony faces. If I have to watch the two of you trade embarrassed lusty glances for another day I’m quitting. I’m going to make a Why I Left Buzzfeed video all about the unbearable vibes of sexy misery coming off the Unsolved set in waves.”

“ _Lusty glances_ —”

“Yeah, only you two _tontos_ could bang and still have unresolved sexual tension on the other side of it,” Curly says. “I’m over it. I didn’t spend a hundred bucks of my own money on sex toys for this.”

Shane feels, quite strongly, that he doesn’t know Curly well enough for this conversation-slash-intervention. He’s always been more Ryan’s friend than Shane’s; Shane likes him, likes the whole Pero Like crowd, but he feels painfully white around them, and immeasurably uncool. Like someone’s dad hanging around chaperoning a high school dance and pretending to be hip with the youths.

“Nobody asked you to be Ryan’s fairy godfather of fucking dudes, or whatever. You did that yourself because you’re a buttinski.”

“ _Buttinski_ , really?”

“It’s Polish for a no-good meddler. Why won’t everybody around here just—just chill out and let us handle it?”

“Probably because you’re not handling it!” Curly says, and then he leans in close for a look at Shane’s face. “Oh, I see what this is about. You tragic tree-man. You don’t wanna fuck Ryan. You wanna make love with Ryan.”

He says it long and drawn-out, _make loooooove_ , and Shane wills the floor of the VO booth to open up and swallow him whole.

“Shut up, that’s not—”

“You do. You wanna have face-to-face, whisper-sweet-nothings, slobbery-kissing, call-each-other-baby sex with him, over and over until you die, like _straight people_!”

Curly looks triumphant, like he’s cracked the case at last. Shane doesn’t say anything, but he knows that his silence is confirmation enough.

“I…so what if I do?” he finally says, defiant. “That’s not what he signed up for. It’s better for everybody, except maybe you, if we don’t.”

It actually feels sort of good, to say this out loud to somebody other than his own reflection in the mirror. He thinks he might get a little sympathy—unrequited love is the worst feeling, everybody knows that—but Curly’s already shaking his head emphatically.

“Oh Curly,” Curly says, a high-pitched, tremulous impression that must be of Ryan but which would infuriate Ryan if he heard it, “I really like this guy, and if I still like him after that I must like him a _lot_.”

Shane goes to say “shut up” again, but it just comes out, “Shuhhhh.”

“I won’t tell him.” Curly pokes him in the chest, hard enough that Shane will probably have a tiny fingertip-shaped rebuke of a bruise there later. “But _you_ should tell him, instead of assuming you know everything. You’re a sweet guy but, you know, oblivious. Like a baby deer, if deer could be nine feet tall.”

He slips out of the VO booth again, off to meddle in someone else’s love life, no doubt. Shane feels a little flare in his chest again, a little spark of dangerous hope.

He’s also thinking again about Curly’s care package for Ryan, and wondering exactly what might have been in it, and that line of thinking’s dangerous too.

*

True to his word, Curly doesn’t tell Ryan, because Shane’s whole world doesn’t blow up in his face—but he must tell Ryan _something_ , because the next day when Shane gets into work there’s a coffee on his desk again, waiting for him. “Shane” is scrawled on it, sans heart this time, and Ryan’s sitting at his desk and working like he used to.

“Hey. Thanks for the coffee, man,” Shane says. He tries to put other things into it, too: _I’m glad you’re back, I missed you, I’m sorry TJ keeps glaring at you like you’re the Kevin Spacey of Buzzfeed_.

“No problem,” Ryan says, and when he looks up and smiles it’s a normal Ryan Bergara smile. Big, pearly white, beautiful, but not laced with anything sharp or hollow. The coffee, when Shane takes a sip, tastes better than just about anything he’s ever had.

That afternoon they’re scheduled to film a few segments for the video where Kristin and Freddie of Ladylike style them both; Shane has been dreading it, having Ryan back in his apartment again, _returning to_ _the scene of the crime_ —but it’s not as bad as he feared. The coffee, Ryan’s wide-open grin, they go a long way.

They head to Ryan’s place first, because they need to get the filming done while his roommates are at work. It’s a small team, him and Ryan, Freddie and Kristin, and the intern who’s filming. Shane settles in out of the way, which happens to be on Ryan’s bed, back against his headboard, to watch Kristin pull out a baker’s dozen of jerseys and about twenty graphic tees out of Ryan’s closet.

“The general vibe I’m getting here is a lot of, like, please-don’t-pay-attention-to-me clothes,” Kristin says.   

“Yes. Yeah, that’s my goal,” Ryan confirms.

_You’re gonna have to try harder than that to make people not look at you, buddy_ , Shane thinks as he watches the process with interest, but he doesn’t offer these incriminating thoughts out loud. Ryan must sense it, though, because his eyes keep darting in Shane’s direction, like the long form of him stretched out on Ryan’s bed is a distraction.

This whole shoot is a microcosm of the last year of his life: _looking_ at Ryan, and Ryan _looking_ at him, and neither of them able to put words to what they’re really thinking. It feels voyeuristic, to watch Kristin rifle through Ryan’s clothes and remember with meticulous clarity what Ryan looks like out of them.

“We need to cause traffic accidents,” she says confidently, and Ryan’s shoulders slope with anxiety. He wraps his left arm behind his back to grab his right, everything about his posture screaming discomfort.

“Five car pile-up,” Shane says, to lighten the mood, to make Ryan smile for real. “Everybody’s dead.” _Just shove him out on Hollywood Boulevard shirtless_ , he thinks. _That’ll do it._

They head to Shane’s place next; he keeps his bedroom door closed, in the end, and says it’s because Obi’s still settling in and is afraid of strangers. Really it’s because he doesn’t want the camera on his face while Ryan’s perched on his bed; he doesn’t trust himself to keep the wistfulness from showing through, doesn’t think he’s a good enough actor to hide the depth of his feelings from the entire internet.

They all sit on the floor of his office, Shane’s clothes stacked up around them, and sort through the piles of well-worn chinos and the patterned shirts he only thinks to throw on when he’s feeling particularly jaunty.

Shane holds up a pair of shorts to his legs, the shortest shorts he owns, the ones he wears on the rare occasion he’ll let his thighs out to play. From his side he feels Ryan shift and pull his knees in to his chest.

“Yeah, those are nice,” Ryan says, and only then does something in his tone—so deliberately mild, like he’s looking at them on a mannequin—make Shane look closer at him. Ryan looks caved in on himself, balled up tight on Shane’s floor, and his expression isn’t _sad_ exactly but might be called speculative. It’s as if the process of cataloguing the things he puts on his body, and watching Shane do the same, has made him think about it differently.

Shane realizes that Kristin is watching them, or rather watching him watch Ryan, and he turns his attention back to the video.

Shane slips on a nice new bomber jacket he’s never worn, and Ryan reaches out to feel the cords of the fabric between his thumb and pointer finger. He smooths the fabric of the jacket across Shane’s shoulder, the first time they’ve touched since Shane asked him to back off, and Shane notes with resignation that his whole body still lights up at the contact.

Any amount of space is too much space, and any amount of touch is too little touch. Shane doesn’t know what to do about that yet.

Kristin catches Shane in the hallway, like he knew she would, after Ryan and Freddie and the intern have gone to put their shoes back on. Nosy meddlers, all.

“Hey Shane. You know dramatic irony, right?” she asks, helping to haul a heaping armful of clothes back into his bedroom.

“Yeah, it’s a literary device, isn’t it? Everybody knows something about the story that the protagonist doesn’t know. I’m pretty sure it’s Greek, like all the best shitshows.”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Kristin says.

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason. I don’t know.” She rounds on him and hits him around the middle with one of his ten blue buttoned-downs, all balled-up and wrinkled into a makeshift weapon. “Something just made me think of it.”

*

Day by day and week by week, they fall back into their groove. TJ stops glaring at Ryan all the time, and Curly stops giving them sad little looks when he passes them in the hall. Before Shane knows it the season of True Crime is almost in the books, with a few eps left to air and only the finale left to shoot and edit.

They’re sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on a flight to New Mexico, Devon already fast asleep on the other side of Shane, when Ryan leans in.

“You got my email about the dumb outfit idea, right?”

Shane snickers, because he’s got his Jurassic Park costume all squared away in his bag. They’re looking for the Fenn treasure for the finale, a new kind of episode for them. One where he doesn’t have to listen to the spirit box _or_ hear about a grisly murder. 

“Oh yeah. I’m going for that dad-from-The-Wild-Thornberrys aesthetic.”

“Smashing!” Ryan imitates in a big, broad, nigh-incomprehensible British accent.

“You?” Shane tries to pretend he’s not that curious, but he’s dying to know. Ryan’s email had said _let’s dress up like adventurers for this shoot, i’ll bring the satchel for the jelly beans_ , no more detail or direction than that.

“You’ll see,” Ryan says mysteriously, looking out the window at the wisps of clouds. “It’s pretty good.”

The next morning, the morning of the shoot, Shane finds out that “pretty good” is a wild, egregious understatement. It’s pretty good the way the sinking of the Titanic was kind of a rough night, the way the Vietnam War was a bit of a slog, the way the invention of the wheel was sort of convenient.  

Ryan emerges from the bathroom in his Indiana Jones get-up, too-tight pants and a white button-up and the hat, and Shane can’t even form words. Ryan eases his way into his _fucking_ _leather jacket_ and all Shane can do is watch, helpless. He knows he should be saying something; he’s on camera, for God’s sake. Mark is right there filming tight on his face, and still he can’t school his features into something that passes for neutral.

In the end he manages a laugh, which is a vast improvement on the slurry of thirst-noises threatening to worm their way up his trachea or explode out of him like the Chestburster from _Alien_.

“I’m happy with my look. I’m actually pretty happy with yours too,” he tells Ryan and the camera, only because he can’t come right out and say, “Your leather jacket and adventurous spirit intrigue and arouse me” and he super-duper can’t say “Oh no, I’m in love with you.”

All day long, while Ryan trundles around in his Indiana Jones cosplay, nimbly jumping over branches and becoming rakishly unkempt, Shane can feel himself backsliding. Ryan takes off his jacket and rolls his sleeves to his elbows, and Shane stares at his well-defined forearms like it’s a forbidden glimpse of ankle in 1845. 

In the heat of the afternoon Ryan’s buttons start to come undone at his chest, one by one, until his shirt is practically half-unbuttoned. Shane can see acres of warm, sweaty skin peeking out where the shirt’s gaping open.

“For somebody who allegedly doesn’t want to wear clothes that will make people look at him,” Shane says when they’ve taken a quick break so Mark can change out the camera batteries, “you’re wearing something awfully showy.”

“I’m a man of many nuances,” Ryan says. He adjusts his shoulder bag and it pulls the shirt off to the side for a moment, almost totally off his shoulder, and Shane has to clutch a tree and pretend he’s winded from the hike.

_This is oppression_ , Shane thinks. _For the literal first time in my life, I’m being oppressed._

He’s starting to wonder if Ryan hasn’t been planning this, exactly this, the entire time. Perhaps the whole careful, solicitous, boundary-respecting thing has just been a clever ruse to lull Shane into a false sense of security, to hit him with the leather jacket and the hat when his defenses were down.

If so, it’s fucking working. By the time they make their way back to the Best Western, possessed of lots of good footage and exactly zero treasure, Shane’s pissed about the whole thing.

Back in the room, they film a snarky little outro for the Reddit crowd, who desperately need to feel _seen_ , and Shane can’t stop sneaking glances at Ryan in the mirror. His white shirt’s rumpled, pulled open so carelessly that Shane almost feels like he shouldn’t be filming it, although he’s not sure where that particular possessive impulse comes from.

The moment the camera’s away, Shane dives straight for the mini-bar.

“Thirsty?” Ryan asks mildly as Shane pours three fingers of whiskey into a glass and tosses in a hint of Coke for the carbonation.

“ _Thirsty_?” Shane imitates. “Don’t you give me that, you—you _rogue_.”

Ryan’s smile is indeed roguish, but also a little perplexed.

“Are you pissed at me?”

“You promised, you promised me you’d stop. This is the opposite of stopping, Ryan! This is an _escalation_.”

Ryan frowns and makes his way to the mini-bar for a drink of his own, as if he’s realized it’s about to be that kind of night.

“What are you talking about?”

Shane makes a derisive noise. Nobody’s that clueless; Ryan can’t possibly have missed the way Shane looked at him today. TJ and Devon and Mark sure as shit didn’t miss it, and when the episode airs the viewers won’t miss it either, unless they’re all too busy staring at Ryan to notice that Shane is _also_ staring at Ryan. 

“This,” he says, waving a hand to indicate Ryan’s whole situation, “is a triple-layer chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and little chocolate rosettes piped on. This is the Cake Boss of outfits.”

He’s just so exhausted, all of a sudden. So desperately tired. He’s been worn down, over the course of this long day, by the divot in Ryan’s forearms formed by hard-working flexor muscles.  

“Jesus Christ. It’s a bit. For the show. It’s not about you. I didn’t wake up and think, gosh, how can I torture Shane today?” Ryan takes his hat off and rubs his head, making his hair stick up funny. “Cut it out with the fuckin’ metaphors and just say what you mean, for once.”

Shane doesn’t plan for it to happen. He opens his mouth to say something else, anything else, and it tumbles on out, entirely uninvited but not untrue. Too true to stay inside him for a minute longer.

“I love you,” he says. Even as he hears himself saying it he’s wondering how to take it back, how to turn it into a joke, but he comes up entirely blank. All his bits and quips have left him alone with his feelings. Standing in front of this man, Shane’s just an unfunny, unclever shell of a person who used to be able to function but now can only _want_ , and mope, and make whirring noises, and shut down.

Ryan sits back on the bed with a broad, joyful smile, folds his arms across his chest, and says, “I know.”


	4. Chapter 4

Ryan leans back and crosses his arms across his chest. There’s something exploding inside him, fireworks popping off from his pelvis to his stomach to his ribs, but he tries to keep cool. Harrison Ford, he knows, would be cool. Han Solo would be cool. Indiana Jones would be _cool_.

“I know,” he says.

Shane gapes at him.

“Did you just _Young Harrison Ford_ me? It’s, it’s, you’re not even dressed for the right movie,” he splutters.

“Yeah, but this is as close as I’m gonna get and I’ve always wanted to pull out that line, so please let me have this.”

Ryan thinks this is a fair point. He knows that if their positions were reversed Shane would have done the same thing without hesitation. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

“Did you really know?”

Ryan shrugs. The hat lays next to him on the bed, abandoned, and he can see Shane looking at it, and then back at Ryan, and then back to the hat. Ryan wonders if Shane’s thinking about asking him to put it back on, and whether it’s weird that he sort of hopes Shane _will_ ask.  

It’s probably weird.

“I don’t think I was expecting a whole declaration,” he says. “But you were going on about cake, and wanting the cake too much, and that was kind of strange. Also Curly might have mentioned something about passionate lovemaking under a waterfall and a wild African sunset, and I quote, ‘Like in _The Lion King_.'”

Ryan waits expectantly for Shane to say something, but Shane doesn’t say anything. Ryan’s pretty sure Shane’s at bat, here: Shane said the thing, and then Ryan said the thing, and now it’s Shane’s turn to say another thing. That is, as he understands it, how talking works.

“Okay, well, I guess now you know,” Shane says, and he starts rooting around in his bag. Ryan feels pretty strongly that they’re still in the middle of an important conversation here, but Shane’s getting his PJs and his Dopp kit out of his luggage. “I’m—um—shower.”

Ryan doesn’t understand what’s gone wrong here, where the miscommunication’s happened, whether he’s misread the whole situation. He thought this would be the key that unlocked it all for Shane, the unveiling of some new and frankly _bananas_ path that they’d figure out together, as a team, but Shane still seems to be going it alone. Leaving him behind.

Ryan keeps not understanding for the entirety of Shane’s shower. He doesn’t understand when Shane brushes past him on the way out of the bathroom, smelling like minty, spicy hotel body wash and toothpaste and refusing to look Ryan in the eye.

Ryan still doesn’t understand when he gets in the shower, thoroughly scrubbing the grime and sweat of the day off him. He doesn’t understand when he starts humming “Eye of the Tiger” off-key to himself, when he rinses the shampoo out of his hair as he picks over the weirdness of the last half hour.

He doesn’t understand until he _does_ understand, with sudden sickening, heart-wrenching clarity: _he_ _never said the thing._

Shane had said “I love you” and Ryan said “I know,” which devotees of the Harrison Ford oeuvre will intuit is supposed to mean “I love you too,” but which a sensitive, kind-hearted, lovestruck dumbass might easily interpret in the heat of the moment to mean only “I know.”

“I know” is fine for the movies, it’s pretty smooth. But it’s not enough in real life. In real life, people deserve to know exactly where they stand. They deserve to hear the words back to them, to have all doubt erased, to have their suffering ended.

Ryan’s an idiot who doesn’t deserve the person waiting for him in that hotel room, the guy out there doubtless tying himself up in knots trying to figure out what Ryan _meant_ , what Ryan’s _thinking_ , what Ryan’s _feeling_. Good people—and Shane is good people, the best people—don’t deserve that.

Ryan’s been too casual with Shane this whole time, and now he’s accidentally done it again, in service of a bit.

Ryan fumbles for the shower faucet to turn off the water, ignoring the fact that he might still be a little soapy. He stumbles his way out of the shower, too hurried to dry off, to do anything but pull his sweats on over his wet legs and push his soaking hair out of his face and skid out into the room.

Zero percent Harrison Ford. Zero percent cool. One hundred percent Ryan Bergara.

Shane’s lying on his back the wrong way across the bed, looking at his phone without seeing it, knees hooked off the side. When he hears Ryan he looks up, hauls himself up on his elbows, and stares.

Ryan’s dripping shower water all over the ugly hotel carpet. He can feel the way his sweats are clinging to his damp legs, and to other parts of him, leaving dark patches on the fabric.

“Holy shit, I fucked it up again,” Ryan says. At this point it seems prudent to lead with the mea culpa. “I love you too. I realized that I didn’t really say that before. I just got caught up with making the dumb joke and then I didn’t follow that up with the, with the _actual thing_.”  

All Shane says is, “Oh.”

“I imagined you out here thinking that I…that I didn’t, and being sad about it. And I wanted to make sure that you knew. That I, that I love you.”

“Well, that’s. That’s good. You’re dripping everywhere,” Shane observes.

And then Ryan can tell that the reason Shane’s so calm is that he still doesn’t quite believe him, even with all the metaphors and jokes stripped away. Ryan could go outside and shout about it right now, for TJ and Mark and Devon and all of Red River, New Mexico to hear, and Shane still might not believe it. He needs to be shown, and Ryan’s nervous about that, because he’s read things wrong before—in the very recent past—and felt like a first-class monster over it.

He has to hope he isn’t wrong this time.

Ryan’s on Shane before Shane has a chance to react, _on him_ from head to toe, a very wet armful of warm skin and sopping wet hair. Ryan can feel the water transferring from his own body to Shane’s clothes, the droplets flowing in little rivers down the back of Ryan’s neck and all over Shane’s hand where he’s suddenly grasping at Ryan’s naked upper back.

Shane’s mouth on his is like he remembers it. _We were good at this part_ , Ryan thinks, _and we still are._ It gives him the confidence to forge ahead, to straddle Shane with one smooth, deliberate motion and give a great clattering breath into his mouth when Shane pulls him in close by his ass.

 _Jesus Christ, we’ve been so fucking stupid_. It’s all so painfully, ridiculously easy, the slide of Shane’s mouth on his and the slow circular grind of his hips against Shane’s hips. _We were just drunk, and nervous, and idiots._

Ryan rubs his bare chest on Shane’s shirt, transferring the water so Shane’s clothes are sticking to him too.

“Are you using me to dry off?” Shane asks, pulling away. “I’m not your towel.”

“Fifteen minutes ago it’s ‘oh, I love you so much, Ryan’ and now you won’t even let me rub off on you?”

“Oh no,” Shane says, “don’t misrepresent my position. You can _rub off on me_ all you want.”

Ryan snickers and worms his hands under Shane’s shirt to slide up his ribcage, counting off ribs as they go.

“Be more—off,” Ryan says, tugging at Shane’s shirt from the other side of it. For a minute Shane looks like he’s considering giving Ryan more shit, but then he gently tips Ryan off and pulls his shirt over his head.

Once Shane’s shirt is off, once they’re skin-to-skin, once Ryan gets going, he can’t stop: he’s filled with the need to be naked, to get Shane naked, to find out how to make their bodies fit together properly when they’re not too drunk to be trusted. He really wants to show Shane what he’s been working on, if Shane will have him.

Shane starts the work of peeling Ryan’s wet sweats down his legs. He’s only as far as getting the waistband over Ryan’s hipbones, a patch of dark hair peeking over the top, when he sits back on his heels to look again. Ryan knows Shane’s seen it all before, but he’s looking at him now like he hasn’t. Like it’s all brand-new.

Shane sits and rubs circles into Ryan’s hips with his thumbs, considering.

Ryan nudges at his thigh. “Hey man, where’d you go?”

“I was just thinking,” Shane says. “Sure, a person could go their whole life without cake and still be _technically_ alive, but at what cost?” 

“No more metaphors,” Ryan groans. “Only fucking.”

“Mmm. Did you say something about research, a while back?” Shane asks, peeling Ryan’s sweats down his damp thighs, meticulously unsticking the fabric from his legs. The whole room feels humid now, muggy from the hot steam of the shower. When Shane’s cool hands come to rest on the damp warm skin of Ryan’s thighs, Ryan half expects mist to rise off them.

This is kind of embarrassing, but then Shane drags his right hand off Ryan’s thigh to grasp his dick and Ryan forgets to be embarrassed.

“Yeah, it was a whole _Rocky_ thing,” he says, gasping as Shane gives him a few half-hearted, cautious pumps. He’s obviously still gun-shy, and Ryan can’t blame him. “Since when do you care about my research?”

“Since it got sexy instead of murdery,” Shane counters. “What _Rocky_ thing?”

Ryan shakes his head. “It was really stupid. I thought that if I got _really_ good at dick, it would fix everything. Curly was doing the whole, you know, Mr. Miyagi routine. In my head, there were training montages.”

“Again, different movies, but. So, uh, did you get really good at it?” Shane’s hand speeds up, like this is really important to him, like he’s laser-focused on the answer.  

“Picked up a few things,” Ryan gasps out, and then it’s getting too good too fast and he has to reach down to grab Shane’s wrist and still his hand. This isn’t a problem he’s had in a really long time, Shane-related incidences notwithstanding, and he has to think that the newness of it all has got his body confused and thrilled. “Don’t push it, I’m—”

“Again?” Shane asks, but he moves his hand to safer ground, up Ryan’s side and arm to his bicep, to let Ryan compose himself.

“Maybe you’re just really gifted at handies. Big hands.”

“Yeah, maybe. So, you researched?” Shane presses again, not to be distracted.

“I wanted you to be…impressed, I guess. Or maybe that’s not right. I didn’t want you to have to worry about me. It really seemed like last time you were. I think it was my fault it was so bad.”

Shane noses his face into Ryan’s stomach, pressing kisses to his belly, to the very lightly-haired skin under his belly-button. He rests his forehead there for a moment, and then he looks up at Ryan. The angle, the visual, Shane looking up at him from under shower-damp hair, Shane’s breath so close to his dick, nearly kills him.

“Oh, Ryan, it’s not about _fault_. I don’t need you to be a sex god,” Shane says. “I just need you to be as invested in this as I am. If that’s true, and you’re good, I’m good.”

Shane gets his mouth around him, then, and Ryan’s _perfect_.

It’s evident pretty quickly that a lack of vision isn’t going to be a problem this time. Shane’s bringing plenty to the table in terms of ideas—his mouth on Ryan’s cock, tongue on his balls, laughing into Ryan’s thigh when he gets a little aftertaste of soap Ryan missed in his hurry—but it’s Ryan who has a clear plan and a direction.

When he can’t take it anymore, when he knows he has to get Shane’s mouth and tongue and teeth off him or come now when he really wants to come later, Ryan rolls away off the bed. He starts digging around in his bag, and Shane watches with a twinkling sort of curiosity as Ryan pulls a bottle of lube and a shiny foil packet out.

He flicks the condom at Shane’s chest; Shane fumbles it, almost dropping it on the bed, and looks down at it with dawning understanding. Ryan can see the speedy reconfiguring Shane’s doing in his own head, trying to reconcile the anxious Ryan that he knows and the fumbling Ryan he has already slept with this Ryan, who can pull lube and a condom out of his bag without blinking.

He’s proud to have rendered Shane speechless yet again tonight. To be capable of surprising him, in a good way this time. Ryan’s spent some very rewarding hours of his life, these last few weeks, building up the confidence with his own body that makes this moment possible.

“Well,” Shane says eventually, rolling the foil packet around his fingers like he’s attempting sleight-of-hand magic. “Somebody came prepared. Do you lug this stuff around with you all the time? Keep it in your satchel, with your holy water gun and the jelly beans?”

“Just in case,” Ryan says. It’s not true, of course. He almost hadn’t packed anything at all, but at the last moment he thought _what if?_ and tossed them in his bag. At the time, it had felt like tempting fate to even imagine.

“Obviously I would be honored to penetrate you to the best of my abilities,” Shane says, “but that’s not something I—I don’t—I’m not sure I know what I’m doing. Given our track record, I have concerns about attempting something with such a high degree of difficulty.”

“Shane, I’ve got this,” Ryan says, rolling his eyes and grabbing for the lube. “You can, you know, lie back and think of England if you want.”

“That makes me feel really special and loved, thank you, I—wait, really?”

Shane looks so freshly flummoxed that Ryan has to laugh.

“Yeehaw,” he says. “That’s how it was easiest when I practiced, so I thought...”

“Good thought,” Shane says quickly. “Let me…God. Can I see?”

Ryan can feel his face going beet red at that, but after only the slightest hesitation he flops over on his back. He doesn’t always love to be looked at, but somehow that nervousness doesn’t apply to Shane. With Shane he craves it, sometimes; he goes out of his way to come up with the silliest theories he can, to make Shane gape in open-mouthed exasperation. He stretches just so, or laughs a little too loud, to make Shane _look_.

This is that, but dialed all the way up.

So he makes a bit of a show of it. He spreads his legs and hikes up his hips and coats his fingers in lube, right where Shane can see. Lets it drip down his hand and onto the sheets in a way that is vivid and dirty and downright unnecessary, except for the way it makes Shane gulp around air.

Ryan pushes a finger inside while Shane watches at his knees with laser-intent focus. He gives it almost no time at all before adding a second, because he knows now that the stretch is better and that the visual’s better too. He can feel himself opening around his fingers, getting used to them, getting the range of motion necessary to bear down and crook them. He can feel Shane’s eyes on him.

His dick jumps on his stomach, and Shane lets out a low whistle.

“Huh. What’s it feel like?”

Ryan just shakes his head, because he doesn’t have the words for it in this moment, and inches in a third finger. He can’t believe he’s lying in a fucking Best Western, fingering himself open in front of Shane like it’s normal for them. He can feel his body doing what he needs it to do, responding to the training like any other muscle.

Shane reaches out to touch, to get his hand around Ryan’s dick again, and Ryan shakes his head more vociferously. “No, you can’t, really, not like this, I’ll—”

“I’m starting to feel superfluous here,” Shane cracks weakly.

“I promise in a minute you’ll feel like a part of the team,” Ryan says. He’s almost ready, though he’s tempted to draw it out, if only for the way Shane’s breathing so shallowly and fighting the urge to stroke himself.

True to his word, Ryan withdraws his fingers a few moments later, flustered but determined. He gives everything another pass with the lube and then he’s clambering on top of Shane, reveling in the body-to-body press again.

There’s only a minute of fumbling and aligning, and then Ryan is sitting back onto Shane, a slow slick slide down against pressure. Shane grabs the comforter with both hands to prevent himself from bucking up, but he kindly transfers them to Ryan’s hips when Ryan feels his thighs start to quiver with the strain.

Ryan holds his breath the whole way. When he’s seated as far down on Shane’s dick as he can go he lets it all out, one long exhale so loud it could pass for a groan.

“Holy hell, Ryan,” Shane says. “This is the best research you’ve ever done. By far the strongest case you’ve ever presented. I cannot stress enough how compelling I find this evidence.”

Ryan grins down at Shane from under sweaty hair, not bothering to hide how much he loves the validation, how much Shane’s approval matters to him now more than ever. And then he starts to _move_ , a slow, torturous rocking designed to test Shane’s patience and resolve. He always thought it should be this way, both as retribution for the Hot Daga and because he has to know, _has_ to find out, what it will take to make Shane lose control.

“God, shut up, Shane.”

Shane looks up at him with the fondest, sappiest expression on his face. Ryan would make fun of it if he didn’t like it so much, if he didn’t want to see it again and again. But because he does, that would be hypocritical.

“You’re a real romantic, you know that?” Ryan says, moving a little faster, bringing his hands up to grab for Shane’s wrists and pin them on either side his head. Loosely enough that Shane can pull away, if he wants to, but tight enough for him to know that Ryan would rather he didn’t. “This whole time you just wanted to fuck with _feelings_. I should have known.”

“Guilty,” Shane agrees. He surges up with the parts of him that can easily move to get his mouth on Ryan’s neck, on his chest, anywhere he can reach. “Thanks for not giving up on me.”

Ryan snorts. “Thank Curly.”

“I’ll send him a fruit basket,” Shane says, and then Ryan shifts his hips a little, uses his grip on Shane’s wrists to get better leverage and finds what he’s been looking for, the right spot inside himself to grind against. He can hear himself let out a moan that he didn’t intend to make.

Shane’s whole body reacts, muscles jumping, veins in his neck so prominent that Ryan can almost see them pumping blood.

“I can’t take much more of this, I, I’m—are you—?”

“Yeah,” Ryan breathes. “Yeah, almost, _shit_ , just—"

Ryan knows he can’t come without something touching his dick, not yet, because he’s tried it. He’s also losing the plot a little, his rhythm starting to fall apart under the onslaught of sensation, his thighs shaking with the effort of doing all the work. He loosens his grip on Shane’s wrists, hoping he gets the message.

It turns out that all it takes to make Shane lose control is to ask for it. He must have been waiting for a sign, because immediately Shane takes the initiative. He pulls Ryan down tight against him, holds Ryan hard at the hips, and fucks _up_ hard and fast. All Ryan can do is hold on for dear life and shift so his cock is pressed tight against Shane’s stomach, caught between them and rubbing against him with every thrust.

“Oh _shit_ ,” he whispers again, and then he’s coming, pushed over the edge by the friction of their bodies. He feels the warmth between them, both their torsos slick with it. Ryan’s muscles clench involuntarily around Shane, and then Shane’s thrusting home as deep as he can and coming too, grabbing at Ryan’s sweaty back.

And _that’s_ a feeling. Even with the condom, that’s something a toy can’t come close to replicating, a feeling so intimate and specific that Ryan can’t figure out what to compare it to. It’s early days yet, too soon to say, but he thinks he might love everything about it.

Ryan buries his face into Shane’s neck to ride it out. He snuffles into the sweaty nooks and crannies of Shane’s shoulder, into the minty-soapy smell of him.  

“That’s more like it,” Shane says, when he’s got his breath back.

“I knew we couldn’t be bad at it. I knew it.”

Ryan untucks his head then, and Shane is _looking_ at him again, that attentive, cataloguing look. Ryan lifts himself off Shane, screwing up his face at the strangeness of the sensation. He throws himself to the side, face-down onto the mattress, getting the comforter nice and disgusting.

“I’m sorry I made this so much harder than it had to be,” Shane says. Ryan shrugs his shoulders and twists his neck to the side so he can see Shane. “I knew from the minute I touched you that it was going to be all or nothing for me, and I was so sure it would have to be nothing.”

“You thought I was gamifying our sex life to win a bet with myself but that I didn’t care about your delicate heart,” Ryan says, and it’s blunt but he bets he isn’t wrong.

“Well, yeah. You did get a little in the zone. What with all the montages set to 80’s rock anthems.”

“If we’re being vulnerable,” Ryan says, shifting so he’s on his side, “I should confess that I haven’t actually seen _Rocky_. Or _Rocky II_. Or _Rocky III_. Or _The Karate Kid_. I picked it all up by cultural osmosis and internalized it.”

“You’re the worst fucking film student.” Shane says with a laugh. “And the worst fucking sports fan. Even I’ve seen _The Karate Kid_.”

Ryan hits him on the arm with a lazy thwack, no muscle behind it. He doesn’t know where to go from here. Whenever he thought about it, this was always his end goal and his point of catharsis. The grand finale of the weirdest month and a half of so of his life.

“Now what? What about the show? What about work?”

“What about it?” Shane asks. “Everybody already knows. Devon’s room is on the other side of this wall. You think she’s gone temporarily deaf and doesn’t know?”

Shane reaches up to knock at the wall behind his head, just to the right of the headboard. He knocks “Shave-and-a-haircut,” waits about ten seconds, and then gets a sheepish “two-bits” knock in response from the next room over.

“Whoops,” Ryan says.

“I think we shower, order room service, and take it as it comes,” Shane says. “And maybe you let me show you some movies, so you don’t embarrass me in public with your stunning ignorance.”

“If you’ve got a problem with stunning ignorance you’ve fallen for the wrong guy. That’s my brand,” Ryan points out.

“I guess I just like ‘em young and dumb and full of—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.”

“—ideas. I was going to say ideas, Ryan. God.”

Later, when they’re clean again and Ryan’s entirely soap-free, when they’ve stripped the comforter off the bed (“We should really burn it”) and Shane’s flicking through channels to find one of his favorite classic Old Hollywood films on TCM like a sixty-year-old man, Ryan lets himself scoot close and toss his ankle casually over Shane’s. This is still new for him, the ability to look and touch as freely as he wants. He can see Shane’s brain tiptoeing around it too, unable to quite believe that this is for him to have.

It makes Ryan want to pull out all the stops, shift abruptly from 80’s sports movie mode into 80’s rom-com mode: big romantic gesture after big romantic gesture, until Shane can’t help but internalize it. He wants to stand under Shane’s window and blast Peter Gabriel, he wants to give Shane a single diamond earring as a promise, he wants to live the same day over and over until he learns to be a doper person _for Shane_. He wants to march up to Shane’s dad, who’s a perfectly lovely guy, and insist that _nobody_ puts Shane in a corner.

He wants to text all their mutual friends and acquaintances “WE JUST HAD SEX AND IT WAS GREAT SO THERE,” so there’s no take-backsies and no forgetting.  

And he still might do those things, and more besides. Ryan has a lot of ideas.


End file.
